On Form (2010-2019)

"Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion." (Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and the Arab Awakening", 2012)

"[…] statistics is a method of pursuing truth. At a minimum, statistics can tell you the likelihood that your hunch is true in this time and place and with these sorts of people. This type of pursuit of truth, especially in the form of an event’s future likelihood, is the essence of psychology, of science, and of human evolution." (Arthhur Aron et al, "Statistics for Phsychology" 6th Ed., 2012)

"Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage." (Nassim N Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder", 2012)

"The solution to a math problem is not a number; it’s an argument, a proof. We’re trying to create these little poems of pure reason. Of course, like any other form of poetry, we want our work to be beautiful as well as meaningful. Mathematics is the art of explanation, and consequently, it is difficult, frustrating, and deeply satisfying." (Paul Lockhart, "Measurement", 2012)

"Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models - for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works." (Paul Krugman & Robin Wells, "Economics" 3rd Ed., 2013)

"Mathematical intuition is the mind’s ability to sense form and structure, to detect patterns that we cannot consciously perceive. Intuition lacks the crystal clarity of conscious logic, but it makes up for that by drawing attention to things we would never have consciously considered." (Ian Stewart, "Visions of Infinity", 2013)

"Thinking in models has enormous advantages for us as a species, in representing the unknowable world in a form in which we can locate ourselves and with which we can engage. But it also has disadvantages for us whether as natural scientists, psychoanalytic theorists, practising analysts, or simply as individuals. We can become in Wittgenstein’s phrase the fly in the ‘fly bottle’ of our own model, with its own language from which philosophy might have a part to play in rescuing us." (Ronald Britton,"Between Mind and Brain: Models of the mind and models in the mind", 2015)

"Dialectical thinking opposes formalism because of its separation of form from content. We make errors by abstracting the elements of a problem into a formal model and ignoring facts and contexts crucial to correct analysis. Overemphasis on logical approaches leads to distortion, error, and rigidity." (Richard E Nisbett, "Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking", 2015)

"Data analysis and data mining are concerned with unsupervised pattern finding and structure determination in data sets. The data sets themselves are explicitly linked as a form of representation to an observational or otherwise empirical domain of interest. 'Structure' has long been understood as symmetry which can take many forms with respect to any transformation, including point, translational, rotational, and many others. Symmetries directly point to invariants, which pinpoint intrinsic properties of the data and of the background empirical domain of interest. As our data models change, so too do our perspectives on analysing data". (Fionn Murtagh, "Data Science Foundations: Geometry and Topology of Complex Hierarchic Systems and Big Data Analytics", 2018)