Sublime

George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homewor

His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems",[22] and Erdős drank copious quantities (this quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős,[23] but Erdős himself ascribed it to Rényi[24]). After his mother's death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the

The ideal scenario is to offer the guidance of a structured pedagogy while encouraging children’s creativity by letting them know that there are still a thousand things to discover.

Papert saw that Jean Piaget, his old mentor, had got it wrong. As children grew up, they did not move from physical learning through imaginary learning and on to formal or rational learning, leaving the earlier modes behind as they ‘outgrew’ them. On the contrary, imagining and reasoning added to observing and experimenting, making practical learni

actuarial tables.

The blank-slate assumption is clearly wrong: babies are born with considerable core knowledge, a rich set of universal assumptions about the environment that they will later encounter. Their brain circuits are well organized at birth and give them strong intuitions in all sorts of domains: objects, people, time, space, numbers. . . . Their statisti

The solution provided by Bitcoin is in some sense the purest yet conceived in that it captures this information as speech — we only use software to check the grammar.