War and Peace

In c. 2074 BCE, king Shulgi organized a military reform in the Sumerian Empire, and the next year an administrative reform (seemingly introduced under the pretext of a state of emergency but soon made permanent) enrolled the larger part of the working population in quasi–servile labour crews and made overseer scribes accountable for the performance of their crews, calculated [...]

Read Full Post »

Problemacity

In a recent  Russian paper on mathematical education, I have encountered a freshly coined term which can be translated into English as problemacity. It is the level of saturation of teaching material with accessible, interesting, thought-provoking, developmental problems.
The core failures of science education in Britain can be succintly summarised as its low problemacity.

Read Full Post »

Slight unease

The story about the Chinese and British tests in mathematics was making rounds last year. One can easily agree that a British test is a sign of degradation of mathematical education:
 
It is harder to explain why the Chinese test appears to me pedagogically misguided in a subtler way:

Any comments from my readers?

Read Full Post »

Is maths to blame?

From +plus magazine:
 
It’s a bleak time for the financial markets. We’ve seen financial institutions fall and governments around the world struggling to stabilise the markets. But who is to blame? According to media reports there are two suspects in the dock: the “rocket scientists” (a.k.a. the financial mathematicians) who provided the information behind the market’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Certain Types Of Thinking Are Best Suited To Certain Types Of Problem-solving

With thanks to Peter McBurney:
ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2008) — A new study in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education reveals that certain types of thinking are best suited to solving certain types of problems. Specifically, geometry problems are best solved by a combination of verbal and spatial strategies, but not shape-based imagery strategies.

Read Full Post »

Brain reorganizes to make room for math

From ScienceNews, by Bruce Bower: 
Between childhood and adulthood, neural map of the brain rearranges to conceptualize arithmetic.

Read Full Post »

Niceness theorems

A remarkable paper by Hazewinkel. From introduction:
I aim to raise a new kind of question. It appears that many important mathematical objects (including counterexamples) are unreasonably nice, beautiful and elegant. They tend to have (many) more (nice) properties and extra bits of structure than one would a priori expect.
The question is why this happens and whether this can be [...]

Read Full Post »

A Breakthrough in the Dismal Science ?

A circular e-mail from my colleague George Wilmers:
Two economists have recently won the 2008 Arrow Prize in Economic Analysis and
Policy for a paper providing scientific evidence that (i) studying improves the learning outcomes of college students, and (ii) having a college roommate who plays video games adversely affects academic performance.
So now we can encourage [...]

Read Full Post »

Portraits of mathematicians from Abel to Zygmund

… are on MAA site, available for download for educational or instructional purposes.

Read Full Post »