In the 20th century philosophy of mathematics has to a great extent been dominated by views developed during the so-called foundational crisis in the beginning of that century. These views have primarily focused on questions pertaining to the logical structure of mathematics and questions regarding the justi?cation and consistency of mathematics. Paradigmatic in this - spect is Hilbert’s program which inherits from Frege and Russell the project to formalize all areas of ordinary mathematics and then adds the requi- ment of a proof, by epistemically privileged means (?nitistic reasoning), of the consistency of such formalized theories. While interest in modi?ed v- sions of the original foundational programs is still thriving, in the second part of the twentieth century several philosophers and historians of mat- matics have questioned whether such foundational programs could exhaust the realm of important philosophical problems to be raised about the nature of mathematics. Some have done so in open confrontation (and hostility) to the logically based analysis of mathematics which characterized the cl- sical foundational programs, while others (and many of the contributors to this book belong to this tradition) have only called for an extension of the range of questions and problems that should be raised in connection with an understanding of mathematics. The focus has turned thus to a consideration of what mathematicians are actually doing when they produce mathematics. Questions concerning concept-formation, understanding, heuristics, changes instyle of reasoning, the role of analogies and diagrams etc.

Drawing from philosophical work on the nature of concepts and from empirical studies of visual perception, mental imagery, and numerical cognition, Giaquinto explores a major source of our grasp of mathematics, using examples from basic geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and real analysis.

There is an urgent need in philosophy of mathematics for new approaches which pay closer attention to mathematical practice. This book will blaze the trail: it offers philosophical analyses of important characteristics of contemporary mathematics and of many aspects of mathematical activity which escape purely formal logical treatment.

This new book is an exciting follow-up to the authors bestsellers on differentiated math instruction, Good Questions and More Good Questions. Eyes on Math is a unique teaching resource that provides engaging, full-color graphics and pictures with text showing teachers how to use each image to stimulate mathematical teaching conversations around key K–8 concepts. Teachers using the book can download the images for projection onto classroom white boards or screens. The questions and answers will help both students and teachers look more deeply and see the math behind the math!

The validity of the transformation rules ensures that the correct application of the rules will not lead to fallacies. The book concludes with a discussion of some fundamental differences between graphical systems and linguistic systems.

Science education at school level worldwide faces three perennial problems that have become more pressing of late. These are to a considerable extent interwoven with concerns about the entire school curriculum and its reception by students. The rst problem is the increasing intellectual isolation of science from the other subjects in the school curriculum. Science is too often still taught didactically as a collection of pre-determined truths about which there can be no dispute. As a con- quence, many students do not feel any “ownership” of these ideas. Most other school subjects do somewhat better in these regards. For example, in language classes, s- dents suggest different interpretations of a text and then debate the relative merits of the cases being put forward. Moreover, ideas that are of use in science are presented to students elsewhere and then re-taught, often using different terminology, in s- ence. For example, algebra is taught in terms of “x, y, z” in mathematics classes, but students are later unable to see the relevance of that to the meaning of the universal gas laws in physics, where “p, v, t” are used. The result is that students are c- fused and too often alienated, leading to their failure to achieve that “extraction of an education from a scheme of instruction” which Jerome Bruner thought so highly desirable.

What does it mean to have a visual representation of a mathematical object, concept, or process? What visualization strategies support growth in mathematical thinking, reasoning, generalization, and knowledge? Is mathematical seeing culture-free? How can information drawn from studies in blind subjects help us understand the significance of a multimodal approach to learning mathematics? Toward a Visually-Oriented School Mathematics Curriculum explores a unified theory of visualization in school mathematical learning via the notion of progressive modeling. Based on the author’s longitudinal research investigations in elementary and middle school classrooms, the book provides a compelling empirical account of ways in which instruction can effectively orchestrate the transition from personally-constructed visuals, both externally-drawn and internally-derived, into more structured visual representations within the context of a socioculturally grounded mathematical activity. Both for teachers and researchers, a discussion of this topic is relevant in the history of the present. The ubiquity of technological tools and virtual spaces for learning and doing mathematics has aroused interest among concerned stakeholders about the role of mathematics in these contexts. The book begins with a prolegomenon on the author’s reflections on past and present visual studies in mathematics education. In the remaining seven chapters, visualization is pursued in terms of its role in bringing about progressions in mathematical symbolization, abduction, pattern generalization, and diagrammatization. Toward a Visually-Oriented School Mathematics Curriculum views issues surrounding visualization through the eyes of a classroom teacher-researcher; it draws on findings within and outside of mathematics education that help practitioners and scholars gain a better understanding of what it means to pleasurably experience the symmetric visual/symbolic reversal phenomenon – that is, seeing the visual in the symbolic and the symbolic in the visual."