Increasingly, discrete mathematics is influenced by connections with other fields. We give one example of a broad topic in the field of discrete mathematics that comes from the social sciences, and in particular from the theory of measurement that has been developed to put measurement, especially in the social sciences, on a firm mathematical foundation. The key concept is that of meaningful st...

OBJECTIVE Visual memory is an important cognitive ability, which has been studied in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). In such studies meaningful shapes were used more frequently. Since meaningless shapes provide a better assessment of short term visual memory, in this study we used them to evaluate visual memory in children and adolescents with ASDs compared to the normal grou...

We present an axiomatic approach to the concept of meaninglessness in finite and transfinite term rewriting and lambda calculus. We justify our axioms in several ways. They can be intuitively justified from the viewpoint of rewriting as computation. They are shown to imply important properties of meaninglessness: genericity of the class of meaningless terms, confluence modulo equality of meanin...