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Mathematical understanding is built in many ways. Among these, illustration has been a companion and tool for research for as long as research has taken place. We use the term illustration to encompass any way one might bring a mathematical…
Procedural computer languages have long been used in many aspects of mathematics pedagogy. In this work, we examine the use of Prolog, a declarative language for the same purpose. We find the facts+rules aspect of Prolog to be a novel…
Due to the increased complexity of software development projects more and more systems are described by models. The sheer size makes it impractical to describe these systems by a single model. Instead many models are developed that provide…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
Mathematical information is essential for technical work, but its creation, interpretation, and search are challenging. To help address these challenges, researchers have developed multimodal search engines and mathematical question…
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…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
Our introductory classes in statistics and data science use too much mathematics. The key causal effect which our students want our classes to have is to improve their future performance and opportunities. The more professional their…
This note presents reflections drawn from my recent experiences in teaching a course on mathematics and sustainability, with a particular emphasis on raising awareness of the topic and its broader implications. The lectures were structured…
Embedding words in high-dimensional vector spaces has proven valuable in many natural language applications. In this work, we investigate whether similarly-trained embeddings of integers can capture concepts that are useful for mathematical…
The rules in a shape grammar apply in terms of embedding to take advantage of the parts that emerge visually in the appearance of shapes. While the shapes are kept unanalyzed as a computation moves forward, part-structures for shapes can be…
Mathematical language in scientific communications and educational scenarios is important yet relatively understudied compared to natural languages. Recent works on mathematical language focus either on representing stand-alone mathematical…
Large language models (LLMs) offer a new empirical setting in which long-standing theories of linguistic meaning can be examined. This paper contrasts two broad approaches: social constructivist accounts associated with language games, and…
The growing disconnection of the majority of population from mathematics is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This paper attempts to point to deeper roots of this cultural and social phenomenon. It concentrates…
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
Many have argued that statistics students need additional facility to express statistical computations. By introducing students to commonplace tools for data management, visualization, and reproducible analysis in data science and applying…