Related papers: Is math useful?
Mathematical literacy plays an important role in supporting individuals to fulfil their professional roles in modern society. The affordances of mobile technologies as well as the emergence of new theories in mobile learning have the…
The role of mathematics in a complex system such as the Internet has yet to be deeply explored. In this paper, we summarize some of the important and pressing problems in cyber security from the viewpoint of open science environments. We…
"I am an industrial mathematician." When asked to identify my profession or academic field of study, this is the most concise answer I can provide. However, this seemingly straightforward statement is commonly greeted by a blank stare or an…
Mathematical research is often motivated by the desire to reach a beautiful result or to prove it in an elegant way. Mathematician's work is thus strongly influenced by his aesthetic judgments. However, the criteria these judgments are…
Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving…
This panel draws on research of the teaching of mathematical proof, conducted in five countries at different levels of schooling. With a shared view of proof as essential to the teaching and learning of mathematics, the authors present…
Biology is data-rich, and it is equally rich in concepts and hypotheses. Part of trying to understand biological processes and systems is therefore to confront our ideas and hypotheses with data using statistical methods to determine the…
Questions concerning origin of mathematical knowledge and roles of language and intuition (imagery) in mathematical thoughts are long standing and widely debated. By introspection, mathematicians usually have some beliefs regarding these…
Recent years have seen a dramatic expansion of tasks and datasets posed as question answering, from reading comprehension, semantic role labeling, and even machine translation, to image and video understanding. With this expansion, there…
Mathematics has many useful properties for developing of complex software systems. One is that it can exactly describe a physical situation of the object or outcome of an action. Mathematics support abstraction and this is an excellent…
"Math is not a spectator sport." "Lecturing is educational malpractice." Slogans like these rally some mathematicians to teach classes that feature "active learning", where lecturing is eschewed for student participation. Yet as much as I…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
Many important journal functions would be lost if the mathematical community replaced all paper journals with electronic media. Electronic media are useful for some purposes, but they will not be the basis for a publishing revolution in the…
Learning to use math in science is a non-trivial task. It involves many different skills (not usually taught in a math class) that help blend physical knowledge with mathematical symbology. One of these is the idea of quantification: that…
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…
We state the defining characteristic of mathematics as a type of symmetry where one can change the connotation of a mathematical statement in a certain way when the statement's truth value remains the same. This view of mathematics as…
An argument is presented that mathematics teachers would benefit from an ethics framework that allows them to reflect upon their position regarding the teaching of ethics within mathematics. We present such a framework, adapted from Chiodo…
Over the last decades, a class of important mathematical results have required an ever increasing amount of human effort to carry out. For some, the help of computers is now indispensable. We analyze the implications of this trend towards…
What would you do if you were asked to "add" knowledge? Would you say that "one plus one knowledge" is two "knowledges"? Less than that? More? Or something in between? Adding knowledge sounds strange, but it brings to the forefront…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…