Why Implementing History and Philosophy in School Science Education is a Challenge: An Analysis of Obstacles

Teaching and learning with history and philosophy of science (HPS) has been, and continues to be, supported by science educators. While science education standards documents in many countries also stress the importance of teaching and learning with HPS, the approach still suffers from ineffective implementation in school science teaching. In order to better understand this problem, an analysis of the obstacles of implementing HPS into classrooms was undertaken. The obstacles taken into account were structured in four groups: 1. culture of teaching physics, 2. teachers?? skills, epistemological and didactical attitudes and beliefs, 3. institutional framework of science teaching, and 4. textbooks as fundamental didactical support. Implications for more effective implementation of HPS are presented, taking the social nature of educational systems into account.     

Several complex variables are better than just one

In this popular expository article, we discuss some important ways in which complex analysis in more than one variable is different from complex analysis in one variable. Analytic continuation in several variables is contrasted with that in one variable, and the notion of psuedoconvexity is defined. Hartogs phenomenon and the Levi problem are also discussed in an informal way.     

M K Chandrashekaran (1937–2009)

Maroli Krishnayya Chandrashekaran, Editor of Journal of Biosciences (from 1991 to 1997) and Resonance (from 2003 to 2005), was a biologist who stood out from his peers as much on account of the quality of his contributions as because of his style. He made major contributions to our understanding of the interplay between time and the living world (which also became the title of a book he wrote). This article aims to bring together aspects of his life and work.     

States of matter

All of us have read about solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter in school. Are these the only states of matter? What distinguishes different states of matter from each other?