Keith Devlin sees mathematical equations like sonnets. They are reflections, he says, of the inner world of our minds.

But what most of us learn in school doesn't begin to convey this.

And that's not just because some of us like me seem congenitally bad at math.

Our brains are not primarily logical but analogical.

And what we've asked everyday math to do up to now can be better done by computers.

Keith Devlin is also a leader on the frontier of MOOCs, massively open online courses.

And he believes that online teaching is helping us finally learn how we learn.

To be with this mathematician is to glimpse the beauty of mathematical thinking, illuminating what it means to be human in unexpected ways.

Just as a trained musician who can read music can look at a musical score and in their head, in their mind, they can hear that music playing.

For a mathematician, the same thing is true. Providing it's in a part of mathematics you're familiar with, you can look at those symbols.

And in your mind, this mathematical world is created and you can see the flow of the air of ideas and you can see it going on, it comes to life in your mind.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Beane.

Keith Devlin co-founded and directs H. Star at Stanford University, the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute.

He's also a senior researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.

He grew up in England in Kingston upon Hall.

Were you born, bred, raised in Yorkshire, is that right?

Yeah, I was born in Hull, in what apparently was the worst snowstorm of the decade in 1947.

So I had a very exciting melodramatic entry into the world.

Which you don't recall?

I don't recall now, but my mother, who was a long past away now, she told me of the difficulty getting a midwife in and the doctor and anything.

The lady next door actually delivered me because nobody could get out.

There were snow drifts outside the house of several feet deep, apparently.

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