CTK Insights

This is a short note for the record. I've been preparing a page on the indivisibles (not ready yet), when my eighth grader boy came up to share his solutions to a couple of olympiad problems. We talked a few minutes about the olympiad and then, sensing his mood, I decided to catch the moment [...]

Author Paul H. Nahin tells in Introduction to his new book how on several occasions the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman spoke condescendingly of mathematics. Nahin suggests that "Mathematics is trivial, but I can't do my work without it" may have been a joke and should not be taken too seriously. He may be right [...]

A recent book Loving + Hating Mathematics by Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner is a collection of stories and anecdotes about mathematcis and mathematicians. The stories have a purpose - to demonstrate that mathematics is a human endeavor and that mathematicians are as human as the next man. Some stories show the emergence of the [...]

This is a hard question to answer because there are many views on what mathematics is and whether it is a science at all, let alone an exact one. And, of course, there is a question of what constitutes an exact science. To compound it all, not only it is possible to question the meaning [...]