Bad parents ‘widen ability gap’

From BBC:
Poor parenting is the key factor behind the significant gaps in readiness for school between children from low and middle income families, a study says.
Analysis of ability test scores of children in the UK and US showed the poorer their families, the less well prepared they were for school.
But the study found up to [...]

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Consitent group choice and ultrafilters

Since I first encountered ultraproduct I had a feeling that Łoś’s theorem is a kind of a voting scheme on the set of indices in the ultraproduct This happened to be a relatively well known interpretation, developed mostly in the theory of social choice.  Still, I felt that it is worthwhile to document [...]

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Demographic change in maths education research

From a paper by Solomon Garfunkel:

It should also be said that if one goes back 20 years or so, most of the principal investigators (PI’s) on math education projects were Ph.D. mathematicians who had so to speak ‘given their youth to the devil and were giving their old age to the lord’. In other words, they had taken an [...]

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When English is a second language of a teacher

English is not my mother tongue, and I wish to say a few words to fellow sufferers who, like me, are forced to strain their voice cords by giving lectures in a foreign tongue to audiences of up to 200 students.
 I came to Britain already having had some serious teaching experience. It was obvious for [...]

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Expression of Mathematics in Various Languages

The aim of the following brief questionnaire is to gather basic information about those features of various languages which significantly affect expression of mathematical concepts and arguments. I would be most grateful to you if you could provide me with answers in respect of your mother tongue.

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Women and Mathematics

[First published in the old blog on Monday, August 21, 2006]
It is a sad statistical fact that the number of women doing mathematical research is disappointingly small. I am confident that this cannot be explained by the psychophysiological gender differences – even if neurophysiologists find subtle variance in language and visual processing in male and [...]

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Primary School Arithmetic and Group Cohomology

[Originally published on Blogger, Monday, August 28, 2006]

In Molier’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain was surprised to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life. I was recently reminded (by Mikael Johanssons’ blog) that all my life I was calculating 2-cocycles. Indeed, a carry in elementary arithmetic, a digit that [...]

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Bishop Berkeley’s unanswered Query

The Analyst by Bishop George Berkeley, the famous pamphlet against vagueness of early Analysis, ends with a list of 67 Queries. Quite a number of them, in my humble opinion, remain unanswered, this one in particular:
Qu. 38. Whether tedious Calculations in Algebra and Fluxions be the likeliest Method to improve the Mind? And whether Mens being accustomed [...]

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evolutionary biologists talking about learning

From a friend, a link to NYT. A jucy bit:
“We took some population of flies and kept them over 30 generations on really poor food so they adapted so they could develop better on it,” Dr. Kawecki said. “And then we asked what happened to the learning ability. It went down.”

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The Downward Spiral of Physics

I republish my old post of Saturday, August 19, 2006, from my defunct blog:
Recent reports about of a “downward spiral” of physics education in Britain are strikingly similar to the last year’s discussion of a downward spiral in mathematics education.

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