Mathematics: rigorous, tedious, fantastic, fairy-like

What strikes me about the following quote from Scientific American in 1908 is the opinionated, chatty, subjective, silly, and nearly-trivial tone which so often is blamed on the recent influence of blogging. There ain’t nothing new under the sun.

Mathematics is the most exact and the most thoroughly grounded of the sciences. And yet, in the [...]

Creativity: a scientific viewpoint

Last night I was lucky enough to be able to attend a wonderful two hour lecture and chat session with Margaret Boden OBE, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in my old home town of Brighton. She is here visiting the University of Canterbury as a Distinguished Erskine Fellow, and gave [...]

The meaning of scientific literacy

The promotion of scientific and mathematical literacy is always to be applauded. Looking at the world honestly, and drawing conclusions based on the evidence, are two important skills for making a human whole. Alone, they lead to a lifeless vision of terrifying sterility, but combined with compassion, creativity, imagination, and love, they have the power [...]

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 [...]

New paper on arXiv

Well, it’s not much of an achievement, but the paper that was recently rejected by a peer-reviewed journal, is no available from the open access preprint archive, arXiv. You can read it for free here.
P.S. The first figure looks awful for some reason, but please don’t hold that against the paper!
P.P.S. I’ve held back from [...]

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 [...]

Golden ratio hardwired?

This is a rather intriguing possibility suggested by recent work reported on the New Scientist website. Why are we hardwired for beauty? Why is beauty mathematical (in this case)? Why is mathematics beautiful? How universal is all this? Is it not a little rude of me to ask so many questions without suggesting any answers?

Mathematicians collapse the world’s financial institutions

There is a grain of truth in the vast empty silo of that title. Quantitative analysts are paid well for building and interpreting mathematical models of financial markets and risk. Quants are ever-refining these models, so that they incorporate more and more of the real world. This presents two problems. First, relying heavily on mathematical [...]

Leonardo da Vinci: a fun guy

Here is a modern sculptural representation of a sketch by da Vinci, while below is a photo I took a couple of months ago of a fungus in my front garden.

For those of you with an interest in such things, it is Ileodictyon cibarium (I think).

Heterodox mathematics

Like almost any organised, hierarchical system, mathematics suffers from dogma and oppressive orthodoxy. To be fair, since mathematicians are fond of saying that organising mathematicians is a bit like herding cats, this toeing of the line is less rigidly enforced than in most other systems. Some of us have our toes to the line while [...]