Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Elegance Or Alchemy? An International Cross-Case Analysis Of Faculty And Graduate Student Perceptions Of Mathematical Proofs, Brooke Nicole Denney

Masters Theses

Artist Marcel Duchamp once said, ``The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nonetheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy" (Moffitt, 2012). Just as there is a puzzling aspect of creating art or writing poetry, the aesthetic quality of mathematical proofs is a mysterious and ill-defined concept. Like many other subjective terms, it can be difficult to reach a consensus on what elegance means in a mathematical context. In this thesis, I try to better understand faculty …