: Mathematics as a Cultural System . Raymond L. Wilder.

Gesture as a Cultural System

WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body l...

Design as a Socio-cultural Cognitive System

Mathematics From an English Major's Point of View

ION AS AN INEVITABLE FUTURE By examining characteristics of culture which include evo lution, environmental stress, diffusion, cultural lag and resistance, language, and selection and applying these characteri stics to the field of mathematics, it is possible to perceive mathematics as a cultural system or a subculture in and of itself. Mathemat ics as a subculture is inherently subject to evol...

Mathematics as a Tool?

I analyze the new emerging role of mathematics for extracting structure from data. This role is different from the traditional role of mathematics as a tool for other sciences that provided a theoretical framework in which experiments acquired meaning, with which the quality of data could be assessed and which could be explored with the formal methods of mathematics. The challenge for mathemati...

A bedside conversation with Wilder Penfield.

1976, I served as an intern in internal medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal, Quebec after graduating from Emory University School of Medicine. At that time, interns were still given their own on-call room. My pre-morning rounds ritual consisted of a maple donut and orange juice at the hospital coffee shop, while also devouring The Star, The Gazette and La Presse. Olympic fever w...