Thursday, February 21, 2008

Mathematics Education

According to Wigner it is an odd fact of our Universe that it can be understood with Mathematics. He wrote a classic paper called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".

With Bohm's Holomovement, it is a little less "unreasonable". We are all moving in some kind of synchrony.

I feel that this insight can be used to improve the methods of Mathematics Education.

3 comments:

Kris Krogh said...

Hi Eduardo,

Wigner's assertion has always angered me, when so much of the lack of progress in physics seems due to inappropriate use of mathematics. There is a custom of pounding square pegs into round mathematical holes: If we use the round hole approximation, we see the square peg is a perfect fit. It's amazing!

There is a discussion of Wigner here at the Not Even Wrong blog. One commenter writes: "As Abraham Pais has shown, Wigner has some history of inaccurate claims."

I like Einstein's view: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Kris Krogh said...

Oops. Should have said, "If we use the round peg approximation, we see that it fits perfectly."

Cheers,

Kris

Eduardo Cantoral said...

Kris,
I like Lee Smolin take on Science. In his "The Life of the Cosmos", he prsents the idea, that there is more "life" in the Universe than sometimes we are led to believe.
Of course his ideas will stand or fall based on observations. His theory satisfies the principle of "fallibilism"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism

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