Physical Sciences and Mathematics | Open Access Articles

Connecting Ancient Philosophers’ Math Theory To Modern Fractal Mathematics, Colin Mccormack

Parnassus: Classical Journal

No abstract provided.

An Evolutionary Approach To Crowdsourcing Mathematics Education, Spencer Ward

Honors College

By combining ideas from evolutionary biology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, this thesis attempts to derive a new kind of crowdsourcing that could better leverage people’s collective creativity. Following a theory of knowledge presented by David Deutsch, it is argued that knowledge develops through evolutionary competition that organically emerges from a creative dialogue of trial and error. It is also argued that this model of knowledge satisfies the properties of Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops, implying that self-reflection is a core feature of knowledge evolution. This mix of theories then is used to analyze several existing strategies of crowdsourcing and knowledge …

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Engaging The Paradoxical: Zeno's Paradoxes In Three Works Of Interactive Fiction, Michael Z. Spivey

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

For over two millennia thinkers have wrestled with Zeno's paradoxes on space, time, motion, and the nature of infinity. In this article we compare and contrast representations of Zeno's paradoxes in three works of interactive fiction, Beyond Zork, The Chinese Room, and A Beauty Cold and Austere. Each of these works incorporates one of Zeno's paradoxes as part of a puzzle that the player must solve in order to advance and ultimately complete the story. As such, the reader must engage more deeply with the paradoxes than he or she would in a static work of fiction. …