This is a deep question that has engaged the greatest minds since Socrates, Plato and Aristotle of Ancient Greece. This quest to find absolute truths, spawned the axiomatic method and the field of mathematics.. So, today we regard the statement “2 + 2 = 4” as an absolute truth that has universal acceptance. However, as …
The short answer is “Yes.” According to data from the National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2022 and 2023, the Eighth Grade Math Scores of each ethic group on a scale from 0 to 500 were as follows: • Asians: highest average score about 320 • Whites: slightly lower– between 290 and 300 • …
What is the percentage of the world’s wealth held by the top 1% or top 10%? According to the World Inequality Report of 2022, the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population owned about 45% of global wealth and the top 10% owned about 76% of global wealth. This prompted many economists to suggest that this …
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The answer to this question depends upon how you define success. If you look at the people we see profiled in the media and the people who are called “celebrities,” then it’s true that very few of them majored in mathematics. One reason for their scarcity is merely the fact that only a small fraction …
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High performers, including those of high intelligence, are used to being right, especially when making judgements in a domain where they have special expertise. In 1943-44, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, built the ENIAC3 computer at the University of Pennsylvania. It spanned an area of 20 feet × 40 feet with circuitry that incorporated 18,000 …
The courses in the various disciplines vary somewhat within each field depending on the area of specialty. For example, there is a significant difference in the requirements of electrical, mechanical and civil engineering and a civil engineer may not require a lot of knowledge in the use of Fourier transforms. Also, general economics would not …
Before Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, most human characteristics such as talent, personalities, and moral behaviors were thought to be acquired through environmental influences such as family, education, cultural training, and other factors described as “nurture.” However, Francis Galton (Darwin’s half-cousin) had observed that many …
Your premise that both groups are equal in intelligence and looks, suggests that there would be no particular reason to join one group rather than the other. The best group for you to join is the one in which you find kindred spirits–the people with whom you connect at an intellectual and visceral level. One …
The concept of infinity has baffled the human mind since the time of Zeno of ancient Greece (490–430 BC.) who proposed several paradoxes about infinity. These paradoxes were later resolved with the development of calculus and the concept of limits. For example, up to the 17th century, it was unknown whether the sum of the …
The Statement and Implications of Gödel’s Theorems In 1931, an Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel, at age 25 published his doctoral thesis, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. In this epoch-making paper, Gödel enunciated a theorem and corollary that registered a magnitude ten on the seismometer of mathematical quakes. Simply stated, they …
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