If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical acce...
During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity...
My sub doesn't pay for me,” he says, pulling me to my feet. “That just doesn't happen.” “But we ordered so much,” I say helplessly. “It made you happy,” he says simply. “Now I get to play with you. And that makes happy.” “I don't ...
Looking at numbers as groups of rocks may seem unusual, but actually it's as old as math itself. The word "calculate" reflects that legacy -- it comes from the Latin word calculus, meaning a pebble used for counting. To enjoy working with numbers you...
Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus o...
Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of ...
An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the very least completed cou...
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must ...
Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She w...
That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holid...
Have you ever wanted to learn Geometry, Calculus, Physics, German, and the mystical teachings of Orafoura? Well, now you can! Just not with this book. Well, except for the mystical bit. This book is guaranteed to cost you, or your money back. If ther...
As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the reg...
In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora ...
If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... t...