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What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
For at least 40 years, there has been debate and disagreement as to the role of mathematics in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the math requirements of 199 Computer Science BS/BA degrees…
Mathematicians occasionally discover interesting truths even when they are playing with mathematical ideas with no thoughts about possible consequences of their actions. This paper describes two specific instances of this phenomenon. The…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
Symbolic calculators like Mathematica are becoming more commonplace among upper level physics students. The presence of such a powerful calculator can couple strongly to the type of mathematical reasoning students employ. It does not merely…
Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff…
The purpose of this essay is to bring out the unique role of Mathematics in providing a base to the diverse sciences which conform to its rigid structure. Of these the physical and economic sciences are so intimately linked with…
We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. In our setting, the students of the course have to mark a part of their homework assignments themselves and they receive the corresponding…
This paper summarizes the author's insights and experiences of teaching mathematics to incarcerated students within the U.S. prison system.
Classical mathematics (involving such notions as infinitely small/large and continuity) is usually treated as fundamental while finite mathematics is treated as inferior which is used only in special applications. We first argue that the…
The definition of who is or what makes a ``mathematician" is an important and urgent issue to be addressed in the mathematics community. Too often, a narrower definition of who is considered a mathematician (and what is considered…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
There are pronounced differences in the extent to which industrial and academic AI labs use computing resources. We provide a data-driven survey of the role of the compute divide in shaping machine learning research. We show that a compute…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
Data science is the business of learning from data, which is traditionally the business of statistics. Data science, however, is often understood as a broader, task-driven and computationally-oriented version of statistics. Both the term…
In this note some philosophical thoughts and observations about mathematics are expressed, arranged as challenges to some common claims.
The key difference between math as math and math in science is that in science we blend our physical knowledge with our knowledge of math. This blending changes the way we put meaning to math and even to the way we interpret mathematical…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
Educators and policy-makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary…