Mathe Lab

Inaugural Meeting

April 15, 2022

 John Amos Comenius, Spicilegium Didacticum, 1680

John Amos Comenius, Spicilegium Didacticum, 1680

Mathetics vs. Didactics

Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine, 1993

Mathetics

Why is there no word in English for the art of learning? Webster says that the word pedagogy means the art of teaching. What is missing is the parallel word for learning....to illustrate the gap in our language and my proposal for filling it, consider the following sentence: “When I learned French I acquired ————— knowledge about the language, ———— knowledge about the people, and ———— knowledge about learning.” Linguistic and cultural would fill in the first two blanks with no problems, but the reader will be hard put to think up a word to fill in the third blank. My candidate is mathetic, and I thereby make restitution for a semantic theft perpetrated by my professional ancestors, who stole the word mathematics from a family of Greek words related to learning.

In the Mathe Lab, we discuss big questions (even if we only offer small answers) and consider these questions from many perspectives.

What is a big question that might guide your work for the next 5-10 years?

Warren McCulloch

• Neurophysiologist, cybernetician, engineer, neuropsychiatrist, poet
• In 1943, described the artificial neural network with Walter Pitts in A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nerual Activity

McCulloch’s Big Question

 [McCulloch] insists that to understand such complex things as numbers we must know how to embody them in nets of simple neurons. But he would add that we cannot pretend to understand these nets of simple neurons until we know — which we do not except for an existence proof — how they embody such complex things as numbers.

Seymour Papert, Introduction to Embodiments of Mind​, 1965

McCulloch’s Big Question

What is a number that a man may know it,
and a man, that he may know a number?

Shayan’s Big Question

How can simple computational models give us insight into the complex nature of learning?

Introductions

Name
Why are you here?
What is a recent book you’ve read?
What is your big question?

Introductions

Name
Why are you here?
What is a recent book you’ve read?
What is your big question?

Reading for Next Time