mfrrchris1984
30/09/2020
In instalment 3 we looked at a serious social and educational crisis undermining the meaning of ‘truth’, and its inevitably deeply damaging effect on mathematics —which seeks, as it were, to copperbottom truth by raising it to the status of rigorous proof. In instalment 4 we looked at a glaring, […]
02/09/2020
In this instalment we look at the most howling mistake ever made in maths. But it went unnoticed. It was then, unaccountably, accepted into the official body of mathematical thinking. This is a howler which has generated untold consequences. It was a very simple mistake, but subsequent scholars evidently took […]
31/07/2020
It will not have escaped the notice of most readers that we are passing through a period of crisis and general unease. The amount of rigour being applied in public affairs seems to have fallen to an all-time low. Lying seems to have become an accepted mode in parts of […]
01/07/2020
The purpose of this website is to put a body of new thinking and analysis into the public domain. It is an emphasis which can bring reasoning back into mathematics, and not just as a minor item, but as the central core of the discipline. There was, during the 20th […]
13/06/2020
The purpose of this website is to put a body of new thinking and analysis into the public domain. It is an emphasis which can bring reasoning back into mathematics, and not just as a minor item, but as the central core of the discipline. There was, during the 20th […]
02/10/2023
Some Reflections on the Four Colour Conjecture Part 1 The four colour conjecture has been allegedly resolved by Appel and Haken and others using “computer proofs” which, however, leave a sense of slight doubt in the mind of cautious critics. After the original computer proof was published in 1976 its […]
01/09/2023
The way to a massive, much needed, renewal of morale in teaching maths can be via a new approach —‘Narrative Maths’ based on the methods of Mathematics Applicable, an idea-before-its-time (a ten-year project) which the present author led from 1969 to 1978 at Reading University. Narrative Maths is a radical […]
06/07/2023
That there is a crisis in school mathematics is hardly news. It has been around for so long that it has long since become part of the given status quo. The last significant attempt at introducing a “new brush” into the teaching of maths in schools was the so-called ‘Practical […]
01/06/2023
It is now exactly three years since the conclusion of my project to explain the validity of Fermat’s Conjecture by elementary methods was put online and also published by Ingleside Ashby in a small cottage edition. Fermat had claimed in a marginal note in a book found after his death […]