kitchen table math, the sequel: Godel, Esher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Godel, Esher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid

I believe that music is related to math. I also believe that the decline in Latin, real math teaching, and music are related.

According to this article,

"In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States.[2] The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding." [Ed: and their math study!]

I have a webpage about how I believe we learn through patterns, and how "Mathematics, language, music, art, and many other facets of our universe are best understood through their orderly patterns."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Godel, Esher, Bach is an outstanding book.... kudos for blogging about it. Creative problem solving is certainly birthed from the ability to identify patterns and create new ones; sadly, somehow we've grown as a culture to disassociate creativity with order.

VickyS said...

I too am a huge fan of Goedel Escher Bach. I imagine there are more than a few of us on this list. Perhaps there are a lot of swimmers too (I am forever discovering that the people I enjoy conversing with are or were swimmers).

Anonymous said...

Patterns are primal. Both predator and prey (at least the live ones) must instantly recognize a sound that doesn't belong, or a straight line in a sea of waving grass, or a curve that isn't fair, or a speed that is wrong, and on and on.

Losing pattern recognition implies extinction. I'm not sure what is causing this. My conjecture? Could it be related to the end of consequence?

When prey gets too fat and lazy, under ideal conditions, its own pattern becomes an abberation. Predators act on these signals.