Mathematical Cultures

This collection presents significant contributions from an international network project on mathematical cultures, including essays from leading scholars in the history and philosophy of mathematics and mathematics education. Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematical research and teaching, and great variation in the place of mathematics in the larger cultures that mathematical practitioners belong to. The reflections on mathematical cultures collected in this book are of interest to mathematicians, philosophers, historians, sociologists, cognitive scientists and mathematics educators.

Klappentext

This collection presents significant contributions from an international network project on mathematical cultures, including essays from leading scholars in the history and philosophy of mathematics and mathematics education. Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematical research and teaching, and great variation in the place of mathematics in the larger cultures that mathematical practitioners belong to. The reflections on mathematical cultures collected in this book are of interest to mathematicians, philosophers, historians, sociologists, cognitive scientists and mathematics educators.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Understanding the cultural construction of school mathematics.- Envisioning Transformations - The Practice of Topology.- Creative Discomfort: The Culture of the Gelfand Seminar at Moscow University.- Mathematical Culture and Mathematics Education in Hungary in the XXth Century.- On the Emergence of a New Mathematical Object: an Ethnography of a Duality Transform.- What are we like... .- Mathematics as a social differentiating factor: men of letters, politicians and engineers in Brazil through the Nineteenth Century.- "The End of Proof"? The integration of different mathematical cultures as experimental mathematics comes of age.- Diversity in Proof Appraisal.- What would the mathematics curriculum look like if instead of concepts and techniques, values were the focus? .- Mathematics and Values.- Purity as a Value in the German-speaking area.- Values in Caring for Proof.- An empirical approach to the mathematical values of problem choice and argumentation.- The Notion of Fitas a Mathematical Value.- Mathematical Pull.- Mathematics and First Nations in Western Canada: from cultural destruction to a re-awakening of mathematical reflections.- Remunerative Combinatorics: Mathematicians and their Sponsors in the Mid-Twentieth Century.- Calling a Spade a Spade: Mathematics in the New Pattern of Division of Labour.- Mathematics and mathematical cultures in fiction: the case of Catherine Shaw.- Morality and Mathematics.- The Great Gibberish - Mathematics in Western Popular Culture.- Is Mathematics an issue of general education?.