Full Description
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.
Contents
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?.
