Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense PDF Author: Roi Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171718
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In line with the emerging field of philosophy of mathematical practice, this book pushes the philosophy of mathematics away from questions about the reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and toward a focus on what mathematicians actually do—and how that evolves and changes over time. How do new mathematical entities come to be? What internal, natural, cognitive, and social constraints shape mathematical cultures? How do mathematical signs form and reform their meanings? How can we model the cognitive processes at play in mathematical evolution? And how does mathematics tie together ideas, reality, and applications? Roi Wagner uniquely combines philosophical, historical, and cognitive studies to paint a fully rounded image of mathematics not as an absolute ideal but as a human endeavor that takes shape in specific social and institutional contexts. The book builds on ancient, medieval, and modern case studies to confront philosophical reconstructions and cutting-edge cognitive theories. It focuses on the contingent semiotic and interpretive dimensions of mathematical practice, rather than on mathematics' claim to universal or fundamental truths, in order to explore not only what mathematics is, but also what it could be. Along the way, Wagner challenges conventional views that mathematical signs represent fixed, ideal entities; that mathematical cognition is a rigid transfer of inferences between formal domains; and that mathematics’ exceptional consensus is due to the subject’s underlying reality. The result is a revisionist account of mathematical philosophy that will interest mathematicians, philosophers, and historians of science alike.

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense PDF Author: Roi Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171718
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
In line with the emerging field of philosophy of mathematical practice, this book pushes the philosophy of mathematics away from questions about the reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and toward a focus on what mathematicians actually do—and how that evolves and changes over time. How do new mathematical entities come to be? What internal, natural, cognitive, and social constraints shape mathematical cultures? How do mathematical signs form and reform their meanings? How can we model the cognitive processes at play in mathematical evolution? And how does mathematics tie together ideas, reality, and applications? Roi Wagner uniquely combines philosophical, historical, and cognitive studies to paint a fully rounded image of mathematics not as an absolute ideal but as a human endeavor that takes shape in specific social and institutional contexts. The book builds on ancient, medieval, and modern case studies to confront philosophical reconstructions and cutting-edge cognitive theories. It focuses on the contingent semiotic and interpretive dimensions of mathematical practice, rather than on mathematics' claim to universal or fundamental truths, in order to explore not only what mathematics is, but also what it could be. Along the way, Wagner challenges conventional views that mathematical signs represent fixed, ideal entities; that mathematical cognition is a rigid transfer of inferences between formal domains; and that mathematics’ exceptional consensus is due to the subject’s underlying reality. The result is a revisionist account of mathematical philosophy that will interest mathematicians, philosophers, and historians of science alike.

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense PDF Author: Roi Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883784
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
In line with the emerging field of philosophy of mathematical practice, this book pushes the philosophy of mathematics away from questions about the reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and toward a focus on what mathematicians actually do—and how that evolves and changes over time. How do new mathematical entities come to be? What internal, natural, cognitive, and social constraints shape mathematical cultures? How do mathematical signs form and reform their meanings? How can we model the cognitive processes at play in mathematical evolution? And how does mathematics tie together ideas, reality, and applications? Roi Wagner uniquely combines philosophical, historical, and cognitive studies to paint a fully rounded image of mathematics not as an absolute ideal but as a human endeavor that takes shape in specific social and institutional contexts. The book builds on ancient, medieval, and modern case studies to confront philosophical reconstructions and cutting-edge cognitive theories. It focuses on the contingent semiotic and interpretive dimensions of mathematical practice, rather than on mathematics' claim to universal or fundamental truths, in order to explore not only what mathematics is, but also what it could be. Along the way, Wagner challenges conventional views that mathematical signs represent fixed, ideal entities; that mathematical cognition is a rigid transfer of inferences between formal domains; and that mathematics’ exceptional consensus is due to the subject’s underlying reality. The result is a revisionist account of mathematical philosophy that will interest mathematicians, philosophers, and historians of science alike.

Making Sense

Making Sense PDF Author: James Hiebert
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book presents several key principles for teaching mathematics for understanding that you can use to reflect on your own teaching, make more informed decisions, and develop more effective systems of instruction.

Advanced Problems in Mathematics

Advanced Problems in Mathematics PDF Author: Stephen Siklos
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783747764
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This new and expanded edition is intended to help candidates prepare for entrance examinations in mathematics and scientific subjects, including STEP (Sixth Term Examination Paper). STEP is an examination used by Cambridge Colleges for conditional offers in mathematics. They are also used by some other UK universities and many mathematics departments recommend that their applicants practice on the past papers even if they do not take the examination. Advanced Problems in Mathematics bridges the gap between school and university mathematics, and prepares students for an undergraduate mathematics course. The questions analysed in this book are all based on past STEP questions and each question is followed by a comment and a full solution. The comments direct the reader's attention to key points and put the question in its true mathematical context. The solutions point students to the methodology required to address advanced mathematical problems critically and independently. This book is a must read for any student wishing to apply to scientific subjects at university level and for anyone interested in advanced mathematics.

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017 PDF Author: Mircea Pitici
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178631
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The year's finest mathematics writing from around the world This annual anthology brings together the year’s finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today’s hottest mathematical debates. Here Evelyn Lamb describes the excitement of searching for incomprehensibly large prime numbers, Jeremy Gray speculates about who would have won math’s highest prize—the Fields Medal—in the nineteenth century, and Philip Davis looks at mathematical results and artifacts from a business and marketing viewpoint. In other essays, Noson Yanofsky explores the inherent limits of knowledge in mathematical thinking, Jo Boaler and Lang Chen reveal why finger-counting enhances children’s receptivity to mathematical ideas, and Carlo Séquin and Raymond Shiau attempt to discover how the Renaissance painter Fra Luca Pacioli managed to convincingly depict his famous rhombicuboctahedron, a twenty-six-sided Archimedean solid. And there’s much, much more. In addition to presenting the year’s most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a bibliography of other notable writings and an introduction by the editor, Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.

Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity

Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity PDF Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000533611
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book is based upon the collaborative efforts of the Ontogenetics Process Group (OPG) – an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research group that began meeting in 2017 to explore new and innovative ways of thinking the problem of complexity in living, physical, and social systems outside the algorithmic models that have dominated paradigms of complexity to date. For all the descriptive and predictive power that the complexity sciences offer (the ability to compute feedback systems, recursive networks, emergent dynamics, etc.), they also presume that the living world in all of its modalities (biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social) can be reduced to finite schema of description that delimits in advance all possible outcomes. What is proposed in this volume are conceptual architectures for the living that are not only irreducible to physico-mathematical frames of reference, but that are also as vital as the phenomena they wish to express. In short: life is more complex than complexity. What emerges from this engagement is not the ascendance of a new transcendental principle (or, what amounts to the same thing, a foundational bedrock) derived from the physico-mathematical sciences, but just the opposite: a domain in which the ontological and the epistemological domains enter a zone of strange (and unavoidable) entanglement. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019 PDF Author: Mircea Pitici
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691198357
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
An anthology of the year's finest writing on mathematics from around the world, featuring promising new voices as well as some of the foremost names in mathematics.

The Philosopher and the Wolf

The Philosopher and the Wolf PDF Author: Mark Rowlands
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 163936112X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The charming and poignant story of the relationship between a philosophy professor and his pet wolf. Mark Rowlands was a young philosophy professor, rootless and searching for life’s greater meaning. Shortly after arriving at the University of Alabama, he noticed a classified ad in the local paper advertising wolf cubs for sale and decided he had to investigate, if only out of curiosity. It was love at first sight, and the bond that grew between philosopher and wolf reaffirms for us the incredible relationships that exist between man and animal. Mark welcomed his new companion, Brenin, into his home. More than just an exotic pet, Brenin exerted an immense influence on Rowlands both as a person, and, strangely enough, as a philosopher, leading him to reevaluate his attitude toward love, happiness, nature, death, and the true meaning of companionship.

Reflections on the Foundations of Mathematics

Reflections on the Foundations of Mathematics PDF Author: Stefania Centrone
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030156559
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
This edited work presents contemporary mathematical practice in the foundational mathematical theories, in particular set theory and the univalent foundations. It shares the work of significant scholars across the disciplines of mathematics, philosophy and computer science. Readers will discover systematic thought on criteria for a suitable foundation in mathematics and philosophical reflections around the mathematical perspectives. The volume is divided into three sections, the first two of which focus on the two most prominent candidate theories for a foundation of mathematics. Readers may trace current research in set theory, which has widely been assumed to serve as a framework for foundational issues, as well as new material elaborating on the univalent foundations, considering an approach based on homotopy type theory (HoTT). The third section then builds on this and is centred on philosophical questions connected to the foundations of mathematics. Here, the authors contribute to discussions on foundational criteria with more general thoughts on the foundations of mathematics which are not connected to particular theories. This book shares the work of some of the most important scholars in the fields of set theory (S. Friedman), non-classical logic (G. Priest) and the philosophy of mathematics (P. Maddy). The reader will become aware of the advantages of each theory and objections to it as a foundation, following the latest and best work across the disciplines and it is therefore a valuable read for anyone working on the foundations of mathematics or in the philosophy of mathematics.

Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Medieval Europe and North Africa

Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Medieval Europe and North Africa PDF Author: Victor J. Katz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883202
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
Medieval Europe was a meeting place for the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic civilizations, and the fertile intellectual exchange of these cultures can be seen in the mathematical developments of the time. This sourcebook presents original Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic sources of medieval mathematics, and shows their cross-cultural influences. Most of the Hebrew and Arabic sources appear here in translation for the first time. Readers will discover key mathematical revelations, foundational texts, and sophisticated writings by Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic-speaking mathematicians, including Abner of Burgos's elegant arguments proving results on the conchoid—a curve previously unknown in medieval Europe; Levi ben Gershon’s use of mathematical induction in combinatorial proofs; Al-Mu’taman Ibn Hūd’s extensive survey of mathematics, which included proofs of Heron’s Theorem and Ceva’s Theorem; and Muhyī al-Dīn al-Maghribī’s interesting proof of Euclid’s parallel postulate. The book includes a general introduction, section introductions, footnotes, and references. The Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Medieval Europe and North Africa will be indispensable to anyone seeking out the important historical sources of premodern mathematics.