Narrative in teaching mathematics

Bob has yet another fascinating post over at Heroes Not Zombies, this time explaining how writing about their experience of the disease helped cancer patients to change their thinking of the illness.

In the face of suffering and death, mathematics seems very trivial. But I have noticed that many of the best moments in a lecture [...]

Scientific Fundamentalism

The September 2007 edition of Physics World, the in-house magazine of the Institute of Physics, featured an article by Joanne Brunker entitled “Physglish: our coded speech”. This was one of a series of short essays under the heading “Lateral Thoughts”, essays supposed to be a bit fun and to provoke some thinking in the [...]

All quiet on the matheblogical front

Things have been rather quiet on the blog lately; my apologies. I’m off to a conference next week - the first time I’ll be speaking at a big conference in about four years - and what with that and a long break coming up over Xmas (during which laptop will be banned by a Significant [...]

An aegrotat from all exams?

David Corfield recently solved a little problem I posted on this blog. His name had come a few times to my notice recently, for his research work, his posts on the n-Category Café, and his book Why do People Get Ill? In a peculiar twist, when I went to our library to borrow his Towards [...]

Richard Branson on Education

The supernaturally rich Richard Branson, starting from nought and now running companies worth over $25 billion, gives a fascinating interview which you can watch at TED. Fascinatingly, this creative, generous, productive, socially-aware, philanthropic, witty, charming, loving man says he did very poorly in academic work at school, that he would have “failed IQ tests”. This [...]

Scientific humility

Bloggers and other writing or talking heads of science can be somewhat strident in their insistence of the universal applicability of the scientific method. Those of us responsible for standing in front of classes and teaching them what we have learned would also do well to recall a line from Thoreau’s Walden:
How can he remember [...]

Creativity in mathematics and science

The video in my last post, and Christopher Richards’s blog from which I nicked it, have really got me thinking about creativity, inspiration, and analytical thinking. My own creativity is woeful and worsening. Is this a common feeling amongst adults? Why do most of us stop painting as we grow up? Is it because we [...]

Creativity

One of the most wonderful and stirring short speeches you are ever likely to hear on the subject of reforming our flawed educational systems in favour of rewarding creativity was given by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED conference. I came across this video at the new Creativity? blog of Christopher Richards, he of slowdownnow.org [...]

Maverick Math

An interesting article in Scientific American (linking in nicely to an earlier post) reveals that there is more to success in mathematics than a high IQ. It seems that the ability to hold information in your working memory, while simultaneously being able to control your impulse to automatically follow a well-trodden path leads to success. [...]

“How to make a Feynman”

. . . [Feynman's father's] approach was . . . intuitive and subtle. He never taught facts so much as questions. He encouraged young Richard to identify not what he knew, but rather what he did not know. This is the essence of Richard Feynman’s style of understanding. By absolutely asking [...]