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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…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
Development of several alternative mathematical models for the biological system in question and discrimination between such models using experimental data is the best way to robust conclusions. Models which challenge existing theories are…
The world of mathematics is often considered abstract, with its symbols, concepts, and topics appearing unrelated to physical objects. However, it is important to recognize that the development of mathematics is fundamentally influenced by…
The field of proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) offers an alternative approach to meaning in logic that is based on inference and argument (rather than truth in a model). It has been successfully developed for various logics; in particular,…
An introductory formal languages course exposes advanced undergraduate and early graduate students to automata theory, grammars, constructive proofs, computability, and decidability. Programming students find these topics to be challenging…
Constructive arithmetic, or the Markov arithmetic MA, is obtained from intuitionistic arithmetic HA by adding the following two principles: the Markov principle M which distinguishes constructivism from intuitionism, and the so-called…
This paper introduces epistemic graphs as a generalization of the epistemic approach to probabilistic argumentation. In these graphs, an argument can be believed or disbelieved up to a given degree, thus providing a more fine--grained…
Mathematical proofs are often said to justify their conclusions by indicating the existence of a corresponding formal derivation. We argue that this widespread view relies on an under-examined notion of correspondence, or what it means for…
Turing's (1936) paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure…
Presenting systems of differential equations in the form of diagrams has become common in certain parts of physics, especially electromagnetism and computational physics. In this work, we aim to put such use of diagrams on a firm…
At two examples dealt with in methodologically different ways it will be pointed out how the concept of an empirical theory (in the sense of the Structuralists) can be useful to specify contents relevant to maths didactics.
This article reformulates the theory of computable physical models, previously introduced by the author, as a branch of applied model theory in first-order logic. It provides a semantic approach to the philosophy of science that…
Discrete mathematics is the foundation of computer science. It focuses on concepts and reasoning methods that are studied using math notations. It has long been argued that discrete math is better taught with programming, which takes…
This paper proposes critical pragmatism as a philosophy of sustainable mathematics education to bridge the gap between critical theory and the existing patchwork implementations. Combining existential sustainability as a holistic concept…
To build a large library of mathematics, it seems more efficient to take advantage of the inherent structure of mathematical theories. Various theory presentation combinators have been proposed, and some have been implemented, in both…
We propose a presentation of classical propositional tableaux elaborated by application of methods that are noteworthy in program design, namely program derivation with separation of concerns. We start by deriving from a straightforward…
Finite simple graphs are a playground for classical areas of mathematics. We illustrate this by looking at some theorems. These are slightly enhanced preparation notes for a talk given at the joint AMS meeting of January 16, 2014 in…
All but a few digital computers used for scientific computations have supported floating-point and digital arithmetic of rather limited numerical precision. The underlying assumptions were that the systems being studied were basically…
I discuss the design of the method of entropic inference as a general framework for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. The main contribution of this discussion is to emphasize the pragmatic elements in the derivation. More…