What is a Mathematical Concept?

Cambridge University Press, 6/22/2017
EAN 9781107134638, ISBN10: 1107134633

Hardcover, 316 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

Responding to widespread interest within cultural studies and social inquiry, this book addresses the question 'what is a mathematical concept?' using a variety of vanguard theories in the humanities and posthumanities. Tapping historical, philosophical, sociological and psychological perspectives, each chapter explores the question of how mathematics comes to matter. Of interest to scholars across the usual disciplinary divides, this book tracks mathematics as a cultural activity, drawing connections with empirical practice. Unlike other books in this area, it is highly interdisciplinary, devoted to exploring the ontology of mathematics as it plays out in different contexts. This book will appeal to scholars who are interested in particular mathematical habits - creative diagramming, structural mappings, material agency, interdisciplinary coverings - that shed light on both mathematics and other disciplines. Chapters are also relevant to social sciences and humanities scholars, as each offers philosophical insight into mathematics and how we might live mathematically.

Introduction
Part I
1. Of polyhedra and pyjamas
platonism and induction in meaning-finitist mathematics Michael J. Barany
2. Mathematical concepts? The view from ancient history Reviel Netz
Part II
3. On treating mathematical drawings as artworks Juliette Kennedy
4. Concepts as generative devices Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair
Part III
5. Bernhard Riemann's conceptual mathematics and pedagogy of mathematical concepts Arkady Plotnitsky
6. Deleuze and the conceptualizable character of mathematical theories Simon Duffy
Part IV
7. The vertical unity of the concept of space David Corfield
8. The perfectoid concept
test case for an absent theory Michael Harris
Part V
9. Queering mathematical concepts Heather Mendick
10. Mathematics concepts in the news Richard Barwell and Yasmine Abtahi
11. Concepts and commodities in mathematical learning Tony Brown
Part VI
12. A relational view of mathematical concepts Alf Coles
13. Cultural concepts concretely Wolff-Michael Roth
Part VII
14. Ideas as species Brent Davis
15. Inhabiting mathematical concepts Ricardo Nemirovsky
Afterword. Making a thing of it
some conceptual commentary David Pimm
Index.