Walter Alvarez, a doctor and physiologist of some renown, decided to send his scientifically talented son, Luis, to an arts and crafts school where Luis took industrial drawing and woodworking instead of calculus. Luis Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968. Einstein was certainly not a standout in his mathematics and physics classes. Yet…

Applies complexity theory, a movement in contemporary physics, to instruction of a sixth-grade math class. The mathematical chaos theory, embracing random and nonlinear patterning, contradicts the reductionist, particularist, and atomistic view commonly applied to science and teaching. Fractals and self-organization are similarly powerful,…