Bulletin No. 1, 2015

46   Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2015 INTELLECTUAL CROSS- CURRENTS Predicting Children’s Math Achievement Prof. David C. Geary, Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, University of Missouri, US, was invited to visit United College from 22 to 28 October 2014, as the College’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar in 2014–15. Professor Geary is a notable cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. In the lecture ‘Early Predictors of Mathematics Achievement and Achievement Growth’, he talked about studies which feature kindergarten to ninth grade and preschool to first grade longitudinal investigations of the cognitive underpinnings of children’s mathematical learning and the risk of learning disability. He also covered the study to determine the preschool quantitative knowledge that predicts first-grade numeral knowledge. The Art of Architecture Mr. Kris Yao, a renowned Taiwanese architect, delivered a lecture on 7 November 2014 as the speaker of the University Lecture on Civility. Mr. Yao began hi s l e c tu re by introducing the audience to his ideas of architecture. He used two Chinese words to encapsulate his ideas of architecture. One is ‘tang’ (hall) and the other is ‘ao’ (obscurity). According to him, what you see when you open a door of a building is ‘tang’; what you don’t see in obscurity is ‘ao’. ‘Tang’ is something direct, visible and formal, while ‘ao’ is something obscure, imaginary. But he said that they are not opposing ideas. Rather, they are complementary like Yin and Yang. When put together, they represent a whole. Then he quoted some of his projects to illustrate how these two ideas inform and inspire his creation.