How Math Comes to Mind: Intuition, Visualization, and Teaching

Stanislas Dehaene is director of the INSERM-Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit and a professor at the College de France. He is a neuroscientist. The most recent edition of his book The Number Sense will be published in April. Steven Strogatz is a professor and director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. His most recent book, published in 2009, is The Calculus of Friendship. In this free-wheeling conversation between a cognitive scientist and a mathematician, Professors Dehaene and Strogatz will exchange ideas about how people learn math and gain intuition about it, whether the human mind creates math or discovers it, where math is born in the brain, and what the best ways may be to lead students (and their parents) to embrace math and understand it.