Is mathematics invented or discovered? I've used this title before in Sep. 2007, even though it was really a discussion of George Lakoff's and Rafael E. Nunez's book, ...

The Mirror Paradox The mirror paradox is best stated as a question: why is a mirror image seen as left to right reversed but not top to bottom? I’m not sure wh...

Trying to understand Schrodinger’s equation This is one of my autodidactic posts – I’m not a physicist so this is a layperson’s attempt to explain one of the seminal equations in physi...

Is God a mathematician? There is a quote from Physics Nobel Laureate, Eugene Wigner, that appears in the first sentence on the front fly leaf cover of Mario Livi...

Dame Diana Rigg (20 Jul 1938 – 10 Sep 2020) It’s very rare for me to publish 2 posts in 2 days, and possibly unprecedented to publish 3 in less than a week. However, I couldn’t let thi...

What makes good writing? I raise this, because it’s come up a couple of times on Quora, specifically to do with writing fiction. I should say up front that there are...

How does language work? This topic became a source of disagreement on Rust Belt Philosophy a couple of weeks ago, so I would like to point out that this essay was ...

Where does mathematics come from? This is a more serious philosophical discourse than other theses, or mini-theses, I’ve posted so far. It’s an argument I’ve had with a numbe...

The genius of differential calculus Newton and Leibniz are both credited as independent ‘inventors’ of calculus but I would argue that it was at least as much discove...