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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Descartes Comes Out Of The Closet, Nora E. Culik
Descartes Comes Out Of The Closet, Nora E. Culik
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
While “Descartes Comes Out of the Closet” is ostensibly about a young woman’s journey to Paris, the descriptive detail borrows language and images from Cartesian coordinate geometry, dualistic philosophy, neuroanatomy (the pineal), and projections of three dimensions onto planes. This mathematical universe is counterpointed in the natural language of the suppressed love story that locates the real in the human. Thus, at the heart of the story is the tension between competing notions of mathematics, i.e., as either an independent realm apart from history or as a culturally produced and historical set of practices. Of course, the central character proves …
Book Review: Realizing Reason: A Narrative Of Truth And Knowing By Danielle Macbeth, Emily R. Grosholz
Book Review: Realizing Reason: A Narrative Of Truth And Knowing By Danielle Macbeth, Emily R. Grosholz
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
This review examines Danielle Macbeth’s novel and compelling account of the formal languages of mathematics, from Euclid’s geometrical diagrams to the algebraic equations of Descartes and the differential equations of Newton and Leibniz, to the much more abstract language of Galois, Bolzano and Riemann. She argues that the practice of those 19th century mathematicians, reasoning deductively from abstract concepts like ‘group’ and ‘manifold’, inspired the philosophical logician Gottlob Frege, whose Begriffsschrift captures the procedures of those who reasoned in concepts. However, his way of formalizing mathematical reasoning was obscured by the success of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s …