CategoryMathematics
How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Proved the Unprovable Proposition
He kicked over the mathematical sandcastles of those who proposed a mathematical Theory of Everything
Monday Micro Softy 13: Garbage Trucks, String Theory…
… and Stained-Glass Windows. What connects them?
Science Writing: Dog Intelligence Compared With Baby Intelligence
It’s an odd question because what we should be asking is, “Are kittens and puppies smarter than babies?”
Monday Micro Softy 12: Can You Connect the Dots?
You may use no more than four perfectly straight lines and the lines must be connected.
Monday Micro Softy 11: What Happened to That Other Dollar?
Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy get the discount for their cheap hotel rooms but the figures don’t really add up
Monday Micro Softy 8: Who’s the Better Barber?
There are only two barbers to choose from and the choice may not be as easy as it looks. Also, here's the answer to Who's the Champ?
Monday Micro Softy 7: Who’s the Champ?
A single number does not always determine which player is better
Michael Shermer: Wokeness Poisons Science and I Am No Longer Woke
A number of well-known one-way skeptics and atheists are beginning to feel the consequences of prescribed insufferable virtue
Monday Micro Softy 6: Bad Adding?
It looked to Claude like young Clay’s numbers didn’t add up but he seemed confident. What did he know that his father at first didn’t?
Do We Need Language To Think? Some Researchers Say No
At one time, it was strictly a philosophical issue but then neuroscientists got involvedA controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no). For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings. Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported, When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic. But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part Read More ›
Math prof: Monkeys can’t type out Shakespeare in our universe
University of Technology Sydney mathematicians Associate Professor Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta decided to test the oft-heard Infinite Monkey Theorem
Bad Luck Seldom Persists — But it Never Guarantees Good Luck
Many people embrace the fallacious law of averages in their daily lives when "regression toward the mean" is a more realistic picture
Will a Machine Ever Behave Like a Life Form?
A theoretical biologist developed a mathematical theory in 1991— so far not disproven — that a machine could not replicate life via calculations
Can Mathematics Describe Our Innermost Life When Words Fail?
What if the researchers end up with a number that means nothing while the experience itself remains a barely describable personal event?
Will Artificial Intelligence Revolutionize Math?
In an article in Nature, mathematician Thomas Fink makes the case that AI can rapidly falsify wrong conjectures. But what about its built-in limitations?
Arts major cracks hard math through practice, practice, practice
She became an engineering prof that way. The war on math is certainly not over but the warriors may be starting to find themselves on the back foot
Kurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”
For Kurt Gödel, mathematics pointed to a remarkable world of transcendent order and meaning
Gregory Chaitin’s New Books About Math Make It Actual Fun
He is a favorite podcast guest of ours and, it turns out, a fan of Mind Matters