Creativity in mathematics and beyond

Txting develops spelling skills, how gr8

Jan 28, 2011

Scott Graden is Superintendent of Saline Area Schools and a blogger. He recently posted about a study that indicated that texting helps students develop vocabulary skills. Though he was skeptical of the finding, I am not sure I was as surprised. He cited a news story...

Playing with Droste (on my iPad)

Jun 26, 2011

I have, for a long time, been interested in the Droste effect - a "specific kind of recursive picture... [in which] an image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear....

Online vs. face to face: On asking the wrong question

Jul 11, 2008

The NYTimes has a story today about how higher prices of gas are driving up the demand for online learning. This is a great example of "synergistic" effects between seemingly disparate events that could not have been easily anticipated - but seem to make perfect sense...

A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past

Jul 7, 2022

This is a story of serendipity. Of how an out-of-the-blue email request, about an article I had written over two decades ago, led me to rediscovering authors, books and ideas that I had first encountered back in my high-school days in India and have been deeply...

Creativity class goes to Bollywood

Feb 9, 2025

The third blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. Links to previous posts below. These posts are an ongoing record of what we are up to each week – and are not edited by me in any way (minor stylistic changes apart). Here we go....

Total eclipse of the moon

Feb 20, 2008

Tonight was a full lunar eclipse - the last one we will have till December 2010. Lucky for us we had a pretty clear sky - a welcome change from the past few days. Shreya and Soham and I tracked it since it started till it was almost complete - and then they had to go...

A Silver Lining side conversation with S. Giridhar:

Jun 27, 2020

S. Giridhar (Giri), Chief Operating Officer of Azim Premji University (APU) and I had a chance to chat for a Silver Lining for Learning side conversation. Giri is a good friend and we connect at multiple levels. We both went to the same undergraduate institution (BITS...

Acts of Translation

Feb 23, 2008

I recently finished reading three books: A case of Two Cities by Qiu Xialong, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, and Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith. These are three very different books. The first two are novels and the third is a...

Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton

Feb 5, 2017

"un-creativity" design, invariant under rotation by 180-degrees In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Chris Bilton, Reader at the Centre for Policy Studies at University of...