What is the difference between addition and subtraction?

One more fascinating childhood story, from BS.
I respond to your request for childhood stories about learning mathematics. I don’t think my story is at all notable, but I take it you want to collect as much data as possible.
Two episodes
Ag e= 6 Year = 1948
Gender= male
Language = english, my mother-tongue
Final produc t = [...]

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Assessment is the reward for performance?

Nicolas Sarkozy on need to introduce in France a British-style system of audit of research (from theguardianweekly):
Quite frankly, research without assessment poses a problem. Listen, it is appalling, but this would be the first assessment of its kind… in our universities… the first… in 2009… frankly… for a great, modern country like [...]

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Open access

From MetaFilter:
The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide Open Access mandate. Open Access got a big boost yesterday because of MIT’s move.
For those of you not in academia/libraries or who are too lazy to click either of the links, this basically means that if you’re on faculty at MIT and you publish something, you grant MIT (among [...]

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Wilfrid Hodges’ logic page

A great website on logic. I will comment on a few items there later.

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We still have no idea …

what to do with able children. Compare two claims from recent research reports:
1. New study reveals: Gifted children shape their personalities according to social stigma.
“Society identifies the gifted child with high intelligence and is often hasty to identify this intelligence with specific subjects, especially exact or prestigious sciences. The maturing children are quick to adopt this [...]

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A childhood story: Sir Christopher Zeeman

Ronald Shaw wrote:
Shortly after seeing your Childhood Stories request in the LMS March
Newsletter, by chance I came across Christopher Zeeman’s biography which includes:
His first memory of being fascinated by mathematics was when his mother showed him how to solve a problem when he was seven years old. The problem was: given a rectangle 3 by 4, what would [...]

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A childhood story: BC

I could not understand the “invert and multiply” rule for dividing fractions. I could obey the rule, but why was multiplying by the same as dividing by ?
My teachers could not explain, but I was used to that. I couldn’t work it out for myself either, which was less usual.
Finally I asked my father, who was an [...]

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A childhood story: Autodidact

I was in elementary-school age (ca. 6-9 years) fascinated by  elementary geometry, in part because a popular TV series on astronomy  and relativity catched my imagination and provided some fascinating  statements, like the usual visualizations of strange non-euclidian  things. I found the possibility to prove “obvious” statements by  general principles absolutely fascinating, much more fascinating than  proving more complicated statements. However, [...]

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A childhood story: Robin Harte

I have a curious memory for you, I probably got into mathematics as an escape from physics which in turn was an escape from Latin and Greek — my father was a school teacher who taught Latin and Greek and it was important to me to stay as far as possible from that — I was at the same [...]

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Grade Inflation

We, university folks, are frequently accused of our students’ grade inflation. But nothing can be compared to what is happening now in the financial world. From Reuters:  General Electric Capital corp credit default swaps  (CDS) trade 8.5% percent up front and 5% annually (in lay terms, it means that it would cost $850,000 in an up [...]

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