Viva La Diférence!

I continue my hunt for paradoxes discovered by children in their personal experiences of  learning of mathematics. This one comes from a compendum of responses to What had astounded your? question accumulated at avva’s Live Journal and reproduced in my previous post. I quote:
“В дошкольном детстве помню поразило объяснение относительности временной шкалы, т.е. что нулевой [...]

Read Full Post »

What have astounded you?

With thanks to my dear old friend owl who sent me a link to avva’s Live Journal post whre he asked a simple question: what have astounded you? From many wonderful answers left by his readers, I picked the ones directly concerned wth mathematics. Here they go — I will translate them in English as [...]

Read Full Post »

Exam howlers

Times Higher Education runs a traditional annual festival of students’ examination howlers. Some of them are actully quite good:
“Nirvana cannot be described because there are no words in existence for doing so. Not non-existence either, it is beyond the very ideas of existing and not existing.”
But this is from an actual examination script in my [...]

Read Full Post »

Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught

Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught
Gian-Carlo Rota
MIT, April 20 , 1996 on the occasion of the Rotafest
[picked up somewhere on the internet]
Allow me to begin by allaying one of your worries. I will not spend the next half hour thanking you for participating in this conference, or for your taking time away from [...]

Read Full Post »

Towards telescopic texts in mathematics

From God Play Dice:
Telescopic Text, by Joe Davis.
The web page starts out with the words “I made tea. by Joe” and various words can be clicked on; when you click on them they expand, so “Joe” becomes “Joe Davis”, for example, when you click on it. Clicking on “I” reveals the word “Yawning” preceding it; [...]

Read Full Post »

Stilts confirm ants count their paces

From Telegraph, 1:20AM BST 30 Jun 2006, by Roger Highfield, Science Editor:

An ant walks with stilts glued on to its legs
A bizarre experiment that involved putting ants on stilts has demonstrated that they count paces to measure distances.
Researchers know that desert ants use light cues from the sky to orient themselves on their journeys [...]

Read Full Post »

Black Mask of Al-Jabr

This is my expanded and corrected comment to Susan Beckhardt’s post Musings on Math Education, part 1: Logarithms on a Pizza Box.
Perhaps my most formative mathematical experience was reading during summer vacations, aged 11, the books “Three Days in Karlikania” and “Black Mask of Al-Jabr” by Vladimir Levshin. The summaries of the books from [...]

Read Full Post »

Pappus on bees

Bees were endowed with a certain geometrical forethought …. There being, then, three figures which of themselves can fill up the space round a point, viz. the triangle, the square and the hexagon, the bees have wisely selected for their structure that which contains the most angles, suspecting indeed that it could hold more honey [...]

Read Full Post »

Elephants are good at simple maths

From Telegraph:

When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples.
“I even get confused when I’m dropping the [...]

Read Full Post »

Preface to “Shadows of the Truth”

To give you an idea of my project under development, a book Shadows of the Truth: Metamathematics of Elementary Mathematics, I reproduce here recently updated Preface.
***
Toutes les grandes personnes ont d’abord été des enfants
(Mais peu d’entre elles s’en souviennent)
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince.

This book  is my first attempt to look at  mathematics [...]

Read Full Post »