Description

"Serendipity, inference, and abduction present opportunities for solutions to the puzzles appealing to humans, mathematicians included. When successful, these intuitive semiosic leaps find pattern, even when the pattern may not be explained beyond the frame of the puzzle. In foregrounding abduction, Danesi and Bockarova refresh ancient queries about any distinctions between discovery and invention. The abductive process cannot be taught in a prescriptive fashion, as it resists reduction to the simpler linear logics of our ordinary pedagogies. The authors' semiotic perspective integrates recognized patterns of conceptual learning styles with the pervasive patterns in both living and inert realms, revealed through Fibonacci, Zipf, and fractals, and the cognitive power in diagrams, schemes, and graphs. The authors consider how it is that modeling seems to be tied to symbolism, metaphor, and optical processing. This volume will refresh practitioners from both pure and applied realms of mathematics, as well as other semioticians, pedagogues, and scholars generally." -- Myrdene Anderson