Eureka Cam

Movements reveal moment of mathematical discovery

- By Matthew Hutson

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHEN mathematicians are about to have a breakthrough, you don’t need to look inside their heads. Just watch their movements at a chalkboard.

“I’ve always been super intrigued by this tension between how abstract and conceptual mathematics is, on the one hand, and then just how physical the actual activity of mathematics is,” says Tyler Marghetis, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Merced. He wondered whether he could use the “manual labor” of math to deduce what was happening in someone’s mind. In a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Marghetis and his coauthors borrowed theoretical tools from other fields to show it’s possible.