Mathematics and the Brain: How Mathematics Changed the Way We Think about Ourselves

The human brain is an organ of extreme complexity, the object of ultimate intellectual egocentrism and a source of endless mathematical challenges. Its intricate folded shape and complicated internal wiring have fascinated generations of scientists, but still raise fundamental questions. How is the brain geometry related to its function and to intelligence? How do brain convolutions emerge? How are different parts of the brain connected to each other and to what purpose? How do we decode perceptual signals from the outside world? And how does it all fail catastrophically?

In this series, I show that great mathematical ideas were born from trying to understand the brain and that by using geometry, scaling laws, modelling and network topology, we can uncover some of the basic principles at work in the shaping and working of our brains.