Try to See It My Way: The Discursive Function of Idiosyncratic Mathematical Metaphor

What are the nature, forms, and roles of metaphors in mathematics instruction? We present and closely analyze three examples of idiosyncratic metaphors produced during one-to-one tutorial clinical interviews with 11-year-old participants as they attempted to use unfamiliar artifacts and procedures to reason about realistic probability problems. Our interpretations of these episodes suggest that metaphor is both spurred by and transformative of joint engagement in situated activities: metaphor serves individuals as semiotic means of objectifying and communicating their own evolving understanding of disciplinary representations and procedures, and its multimodal instantiation immediately modifies interlocutors' attention to and interaction with the artifacts. Instructors steer this process toward normative mathematical views by initiating, modifying, or elaborating metaphorical constructions. We speculate on situation parameters affecting students' utilization of idiosyncratic resources as well as how socio-mathematical license for metaphor may contribute to effective instructional discourse.     

Areas,anti-derivatives,and adding up pieces: Definite integrals in pure mathematics and applied science contexts

Research in mathematics and science education reveals a disconnect for students as they attempt to apply their mathematical knowledge to science and engineering. With this conclusion in mind, this paper investigates a particular calculus topic that is used frequently in science and engineering: the definite integral. The results of this study demonstrate that certain conceptualizations of the definite integral, including the area under a curve and the values of an anti-derivative, are limited in their ability to help students make sense of contextualized integrals. In contrast, the Riemann sum-based “adding up pieces” conception of the definite integral (renamed in this paper as the “multiplicatively-based summation” conception) is helpful and useful in making sense of a variety of applied integral expressions and equations. Implications for curriculum and instruction are discussed.     

A killer theorem

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

The mathematical ethicist

Opening a copy ofThe Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

This theorem is big

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Rumpled stiltskin

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

A subprime lending market primer

Opening a copy of TheMathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Mangum,P.I.

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway —a mathematical journal, or what? ” Or you may ask, “Where am I? ” Or even “Who am I? ” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams ’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It ’s mathematical, it ’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Journey to the center of mathematics

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

The Math fall fashion preview

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

More from the mathematical ethicist

Opening a copy ofThe Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column.Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

The three little pigs

Opening a copy ofThe Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column.Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Mathematical creativity and giftedness: a commentary on and review of theory, new operational views, and ways forward

In this commentary we synthesize and critique three papers in this special issue of ZDM (Leikin and Lev; Kattou, Kontoyianni, Pitta-Pantazi, and Christou; Pitta-Pantazi, Sophocleous, and Christou). In particular we address the theory that bridges the constructs of “mathematical creativity” and “mathematical giftedness” by reviewing the related literature. Finally, we discuss the need for a reliable metric to assess problem difficulty and problem sequencing in instruments that purport to measure mathematical creativity, as well as the need to situate mathematics education research within an existing canon of work in mainstream psychology.     

Trial and error

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligencer you may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?“ Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Williams college student course survey form: Instructor modified version

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligenceryou may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

On forests, trees, elephants, and classrooms: a brief for the study of learning ecologies

The classroom intervention studies in this volume, ranging from the study of gestures to that of systemic implementation, are at very different grain sizes. A challenge is to see the forest for the trees – to see how these studies, focusing on different aspects of mathematical activity at different grain sizes, can be seen as aspects of a coherent whole. I propose an ecological metaphor for the study of mathematical activity. In ecological terms, the biosphere is comprised of interconnected and interrelated ecosystems. I argue that, analogously, there are nested and interrelated mathematical activity systems and structures in which “mathematical sense-making” plays the role of “health” in ecosystems. Moreover, what happens in the classroom environment shapes and is shaped by what happens in sub-ecologies of the classroom (e.g., sociomathematical norms, participation structures, communicational forms such as gesture, and representational tools and their use) and the larger social and organizational ecologies of which it is a part (building culture, support structures for teachers and teaching, external pressures such as testing and accountability systems etc).     

Young students’ subjective interpretations of mathematical diagrams: elements of the theoretical construct “frame-based interpreting competence”

During the last few decades several studies have showed that mathematical visual aids are not at all self-explanatory. Nevertheless, students do make sense of those representations spontaneously and—as a matter of course—cannot avoid their own sense-making. Further, the function of visual aids as “re-presentation” of a given structure is complemented through an epistemological function to explore mathematical structures and generate new meaning. But in which way do socially learned interpreting schemes (frames) influence children’s subjective interpretations of mathematical diagrams? The CORA project investigates which frames can be reconstructed in young pupils’ interpretations of visual diagrams. This paper presents central ideas, theoretical background and—by means of short sequences from pre- and post-interviews—first aspects of “frame-based interpreting competence”. We describe children’s subjective frames in a range between “object-oriented” (focus on the diagram’s visible elements) and “system-oriented” (focus on relation between those elements).     

Students’ and Teachers’ Conceptual Metaphors for Mathematical Problem Solving

Metaphors are regularly used by mathematics teachers to relate difficult or complex concepts in classrooms. A complex topic of concern in mathematics education, and most STEM‐based education classes, is problem solving. This study identified how students and teachers contextualize mathematical problem solving through their choice of metaphors. Twenty‐two high‐school student and six teacher interviews demonstrated a rich foundation for these shared experiences by identifying the conceptual metaphors. This mixed‐methods approach qualitatively identified conceptual metaphors via interpretive phenomenology and then quantitatively analyzed the frequency and popularity of the metaphors to explore whether a coherent metaphorical system exists with teachers and students. This study identified the existence of a set of metaphors that describe how multiple classrooms of geometry students and teachers make sense of mathematical problem solving. Moreover, this study determined that the most popular metaphors for problem solving were shared by both students and teachers. The existence of a coherent set of metaphors for problem solving creates a discursive space for teachers to converse with students about problem solving concretely. Moreover, the methodology provides a means to address other complex concepts in STEM education fields that revolve around experiential understanding.     

Don’t Touch the Button

Opening a copy of The Mathematical Intelligenceryou may ask yourself uneasily, “What is this anyway—a mathematical journal, or what?” Or you may ask, “Where am I?” Or even “Who am I?” This sense of disorientation is at its most acute when you open to Colin Adams’s column. Relax. Breathe regularly. It’s mathematical, it’s a humor column, and it may even be harmless.     

Internal Diagrams and Archetypal Reasoning in Category Theory

We can regard operations that discard information, like specializing to a particular case or dropping the intermediate steps of a proof, as projections, and operations that reconstruct information as liftings. By working with several projections in parallel we can make sense of statements like “Set is the archetypal Cartesian Closed Category”, which means that proofs about CCCs can be done in the “archetypal language” and then lifted to proofs in the general setting. The method works even when our archetypal language is diagrammatical, has potential ambiguities, is not completely formalized, and does not have semantics for all terms. We illustrate the method with an example from hyperdoctrines and another from synthetic differential geometry.