"Official math manifests itself as a formal deduction system where you start from axioms and mechanically derive theorems. This is a nerd’s paradise, a world where truth takes binary values, reasoning is either valid or invalid, and there is technically no room for bullshit.
Secret math is the human part of the story—why official math was invented, how we can successfully interact with it, its effects on our brains, and the bizarre mental techniques through which mathematicians continuously expand its territory.
Secret math never made it to the curriculum, because it lacks the defining qualities of official math, and also because it feels peripheral. Official math is cold, hard, logical, objective, and it is rumored to be the language of the universe. Secret math is soft, fuzzy, subjective and, by contrast, it looks like cheap pedagogical backstory."
#histsci #histmath
Born on this day: #physicist J. R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). While best remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project, he was a giant of 20th century theoretical physics, nominated for a Nobel 3 times.
In 1927 he & Max Born greatly simplified how we predict electrons behaviour within atoms. The Born-Oppenheimer or adiabatic approximation is based on the observation that electrons are 1000s times lighter than 🧵
Happy birthday to Italian #neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with for her co-discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF)
Youngest of 4 of a Turin Jewish family, she planned to be a writer but the death of a nanny to cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. Inspired by neurohistologist Levi to study nerves as an undergrad, she stayed on after med school in ‘36 as his 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4319170349
"Published in early 1553, Servetus's Restitutio went unnoticed by medical scholars for well over a hundred years, until it was rediscovered in the eighteenth century by the French encyclopedists Diderot and D'Alembert, who credited Servetus with discovering the circulation of the blood before Harvey.
(...)This attribution was anachronistic and that his idea of circulation sought to resolve a theological rather than an anatomical dilemma."
(Register for the online lecture or wait for the video)
#histsci #histideas https://histoiresante.blogspot.com/2026/04/michael-servetus-et-la-circulation-du.html
Thony C
Richard Carter, FCD 🪲🇺🇦🇵🇸🇪🇺
Abie
Sara Pritchard
Ele Willoughby, PhD
Daniel Bellingradt
Fabienne Gallaire
