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A mathematician friend shared this article with me. A reading protocol is a set of strategies that a reader must use in order to benefit fully from reading the text. Mathematics has a reading protocol all its own, and just as we learn to read literature, we should learn to read mathematics. Students need to learn how to read mathematics, in the same way they learn how to read a novel or a poem, listen to music, or view a painting.

palindrome-a phrase that reads the same forward or backward. Discover the mathematical properties of an interesting phrase.

What do you get when you cross a mafia mobster with a sociologist? An offer you can't understand. It's an old joke, and you could substitute "sociologist" with just about any other "ologist" - the broader point being that professions use language in ways that make it hard for outsiders to understand.

Language isn't only a way of communication, but it is the basis of many different aspects of life. Both science and math are languages of their own, and to be able to understand the style of language can help your brain to think in different ways for science and math.

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

I love the way this guy writes about math. I really understand math as a language because of him. I wish I'd had him as a teacher.

Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that while Google is good at finding information, the brain beats it in two essential ways. 1. Context: Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. 2. Speed Quick access is supposed to be a great advantage of using the internet. Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet "moments" is still much slower than the brain operates. That's why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed "quick and effortless recall of facts" as one essential of math education. Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work - for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases - to proceed. Using knowledge in the head is also self-sustaining, whereas using knowledge from the internet is not. Every time you retrieve information from memory, it becomes a bit easier to find it the next time.

This article talks about how even though learning how to program a computer seems like learning a new language, computer language is actually processed through a different area of the brain than when language is processed. It says that it activates the multiple demand network, which is also activated by complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles. However, it appears to rely on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, which suggests that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either. The article says that researchers didn't find any regions that appear to be exclusively devoted to programming. They also suggest that understanding computer code cannot be categorized as a language-based or math-based skill. Instead, they think it might require a combination of both skills, even though the brain regions don't reflect it.

Interesting article about researchers who are looking at geometry as its own language that might be unique to humans. Combines information about mathematics, linguistics, and AI, and how language might have developed to represent things as well as communicate.

Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. It's important to understand how a chatbot works, employing a "neural network": a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. The chatbot works by scraping the internet for digital text or images. It gathers information from a variety of places, including websites, social media platforms and databases, but it does not necessarily choose the most reliable sources. In other words, even though chatbots may appear authoritative, rigorous and trustworthy, they are not always reliable and can produce content that is offensive, racist, biased, outdated, incorrect or simply inappropriate.