A Lady Mathematician in this Strange Universe: Memoirs

A Mathematician Reads

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to...

The mathematician as a formalist

Why This Universe? Toward a Toxonomy of Possible Explanations

objects, like mathematics, universals and logic, manifest real existence on some plane of existence not in spacetime.) Platonic Forms, abstract entities that are perfect and immutableentities that are perfect and immutable and exist independently of the world of perceptions, are occasionally suspected of possessing some kind of causal or quasi-casual powers.72 3.9 Principle or Feature of Suffic...

What can a mathematician do in neuroscience?

Mammalian brain is one of the most complex objects in the known universe, as it governs every aspect of animal’s and human behavior. It is fair to say that we have a very limited knowledge of how the brain operates and functions. Computational Neuroscience is a scientific discipline that attempts to understand and describe the brain in terms of mathematical modeling. This user-friendly review t...

Jonathan Borwein: Experimental Mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein unexpectedly died on 2 August 2016, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he had been visiting on leave from home institution, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since his death, the present author and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah have been collecting Borwein’s many published papers, books, reports and talks, as well as a number of articles written by others...