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Book Review: What Is A Mathematical Concept? Edited By Elizabeth De Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, And Alf Coles, Brendan P. Larvor Jul 2019

Book Review: What Is A Mathematical Concept? Edited By Elizabeth De Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, And Alf Coles, Brendan P. Larvor

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This is a review of What is a Mathematical Concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In this collection of sixteen chapters, philosophers, educationalists, historians of mathematics, a cognitive scientist, and a mathematician consider, problematise, historicise, contextualise, and destabilise the terms ‘mathematical’ and ‘concept’. The contributors come from many disciplines, but the editors are all in mathematics education, which gives the whole volume a disciplinary centre of gravity. The editors set out to explore and reclaim the canonical question ‘what is a mathematical concept?’ from the philosophy of mathematics. This review comments …


Academia Will Not Save You: Stories Of Being Continually “Underrepresented”, Lynette Deaun Guzmán Jan 2019

Academia Will Not Save You: Stories Of Being Continually “Underrepresented”, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

My entire life I have had to navigate educational structures labeled (by other people) as “underrepresented” in my fields—mathematics and mathematics education. As many people who are similarly labeled in this way know, this meant I had to navigate oppressive structures that positioned me as lesser (e.g., white supremacy, patriarchy). Making sense of these repeated interactions, I wrote my dissertation as a series of three articles, each prefaced with an essay that situated a broader social, cultural, and political context and also connected to my lived experiences navigating academia. These essays were some of my most personal academic writing, and …


Symmetry And Measuring: Ways To Teach The Foundations Of Mathematics Inspired By Yupiaq Elders, Jerry Lipka, Barbara Adams, Monica Wong, David Koester, Karen Francois Jan 2019

Symmetry And Measuring: Ways To Teach The Foundations Of Mathematics Inspired By Yupiaq Elders, Jerry Lipka, Barbara Adams, Monica Wong, David Koester, Karen Francois

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Evident in human prehistory and across immense cultural variation in human activities, symmetry has been perceived and utilized as an integrative and guiding principle. In our long-term collaborative work with Indigenous Knowledge holders, particularly Yupiaq Eskimos of Alaska and Carolinian Islanders in Micronesia, we were struck by the centrality of symmetry and measuring as a comparison-of-quantities, and the practical and conceptual role of qukaq [center] and ayagneq [a place to begin]. They applied fundamental mathematical principles associated with symmetry and measuring in their everyday activities and in making artifacts. Inspired by their example, this paper explores the question: Could symmetry …