Related papers: Making Meaning with Math in Physics: A semantic an…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
Navigating the complexities of physics reasoning has long been a difficult task for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring a synthesis of profound conceptual understanding and adept problem-solving techniques. In this study, we investigate…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
Can AI solve all math? What do we actually mean by doing mathematics? How do we communicate mathematics? What is mathematics beyond problem solving? This essay is my attempt to answer these questions.
Assessment tasks provide opportunities for students to make sense of novel contexts in light of their existing ideas. Consequently, investigations in physics education research have extensively developed and analyzed assessments that…
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
Previous research has found that introductory physics students perform far better on numeric problems than on otherwise equivalent symbolic problems. This paper describes a framework to explain these differences developed by analyzing…
Difficulties and discomfort with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are due to differences in language between it and classical physics. Analogies to The Special Theory of Relativity, which also required changes in the basic worldview…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
Many interesting and useful symbolic computation algorithms manipulate mathematical expressions in mathematically meaningful ways. Although these algorithms are commonplace in computer algebra systems, they can be surprisingly difficult to…
When students are learning to use math in physics, one of the most important ideas they need to learn is that equations are not just calculational tools; they represent relationships between physical variables that change together (covary).…
Since the early twentieth century, it has been understood that mathematical definitions and proofs can be represented in formal systems systems with precise grammars and rules of use. Building on such foundations, computational proof…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
The mathematical picture language project that we began in 2016 has already yielded interesting results. We also point out areas of mathematics and physics where we hope that it will prove useful in the future.
Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With…
For building question answering systems and natural language interfaces, semantic parsing has emerged as an important and powerful paradigm. Semantic parsers map natural language into logical forms, the classic representation for many…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…
Search engines for equations now exist, which return results matching the query's mathematical meaning or structural presentation. Operating over scientific papers, online encyclopedias, and math discussion forums, their content includes…