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Sense and Nonsense in Modern Mathematics

Sat, September 2, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Beacon F

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

This open panel seeks submissions on the history, sociology, and cultural studies of modern mathematics that explore how changing forms of abstract and theoretical knowledge have related to changing material and sensory means of making sense of such knowledge. Modern mathematics features a distinctive and multilayered sensorium of formalisms, images, and embodied practices for creating and coming to agreement about facts and conclusions that can often seem distant from or independent of mathematicians' physical worlds and social contexts. Mathematicians decide what is valid, suggestive, promising, meaningful, or useful through a wide variety of interactions susceptible to investigation, from personal discussions in offices or in front of blackboards to presentations in lecture halls to long-distance theory-work through letters, articles, and digital platforms. These interactions make potentially nonsensical flurries of signs and figures into meaningful mathematics. By tracing the seam joining sense-work and sense-making for apparently non-sensical or para-sensical intellectual formations, contributions to this panel should situate mathematical ideas in embodied social environments. Such studies can show how mathematical institutions, communications media, and other settings and means of sense-making make possible the abstract, formal systems that mathematicians create, while giving rise to consensus, rigor, certainty, and (one may go so far as to say) truth.

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