Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Mathematics and Art
Let us investigate a possible analogy between mathematics and art—art as analyzed in Collingwood’s Principles of Art. It may be useful to keep in mind the disclaimer in Collingwood’s preface:
Everything written in this book has been written in the belief that it has a practical bearing, direct or indirect, upon the condition of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Another my old post from my abandoned blog — I moved it here because of my recent exchanges with Scott Carter in which I mentioned Radzivilovsky’s name.
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If I had not known some of his former pupils, I would treat Vladimir Radzivilovsky’s approach to teaching mathematics to very young children with great suspicion. The following two [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 20, 2008 | No Comments »
The book casts new and paradoxical light on the nature of mathematics. It will be interesting — perhaps for different reasons — to school teachers of mathematics and maths majors at universities, to graduate students in mathematics and computer science, to research mathematicians and computer scientists, to philosophers and historians of mathematics, to psychologists and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 20, 2008 | 6 Comments »
I discovered two posts on Butterworth’ discalculia theories (related to my previous post):
Butterworth - an FAQ on Dyscalculia
Brian Butterworth may have his numbers wrong
at the Lexify yourself… or a friend blog. Dyslexia and dyscalculia are issues sufficiently serious for making an honest discussion impossible. For me, an explanation lies in Stanislas Dehaene’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 19, 2008 | 5 Comments »
From BBC:
Humans have an in-built ability to do mathematics even if they do not have the language to express it, a research team has suggested.
(more…)
Posted in Uncategorized on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
An e-mail from Peter Dalakov:
I am sending this in connection to your call for stories, though it doesn’t really fit your criteria: I am sending a couple of young age stories which are not quite mathematical, and a few mathematical, but adult…
I am male, my school and university (masters) education has been in my [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
My alma mater, FMSh, a preparatory boarding school of Novosibirsk University, celebrates 45th year of its work. My physics lecturer at the School, Evgenii Bichenkov, republished a short article, Physics and Mathematics School in a third of century (Физико-математической школе - треть века), written 10 years ago. My old friend owl translated it into English.
The [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Yet another old post moved here for convenience of working on a text I am currently writing.
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My friend and colleague Hovik explained to me the right way of solving the classical Pythagorean Triples Equation
x2 + y2 = z2
in integers. Of course, after change of variables u = x/z, v = y/z we have to solve [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 18, 2008 | No Comments »
From R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (with thanks to David Pierce, who recommended me the book):
This is not because (as Oscar Wilde said, with his curious talent for just missing a truth and then giving himself a prize for hitting it) ‘all art is quite useless’, for it is not; a work of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on August 18, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In response to my call for personal stories about difficulties in studying (early) mathematics AG sent me the following e-mail:
When I was about 9 years old, I’ve first learned at school about fractions, and understood them quite well, but I had difficulties in understanding the concept of fractions that were bigger than 1, because you [...]
