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Split thinking
The ideological battles at the heart of the $100 laptop
today's Ordinary Reading Assignment - 6xitems
1. Spiritual aspirations connected with mathematics; the experience ...
| Spiritual aspirations connected with mathematics; the experience of American University students from SciTech Book News in Reference provided free by Find ... What draws people to study mathematics? The money? The power? According to Witz (education, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), a very real part of the draw are beauty and truth. To the mathematical mind, the elegance of the mathematical project is reason alone for study, along with talent and the sheer audacity of being right. Witz finds other significant reasons for studying math or making it a career in his intensive interviews with students, including their need for an intellectual challenge and their need to understand the human being as a whole. Witz details the interview project, which included teacher education students, and analyzes the responses from individual responders. He also finds a rather surprising thread that seems to run through many responses, which is almost entirely metaphysical in nature. Math majors want to know what happens across the universe, and their attraction is generally metaphysical as well as practical. |
2. Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are by Daniel Nettle (Hardcover - Oct 25, 2007)
If you are a fan of evolutionary psychology, be sure to check out this great little book on personality. It has a short personality test (12 questions) that you can take before you dive into the book, which I highly recommend taking. Then you'll learn about each of the "big five" components of personality. Each component is convincingly tied to biological systems in the brain, and the author explains how both high and low scoring individuals in each of the five areas could have thrived as humans evolved.
3. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker (Paperback - Sep 1, 1999)
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