Abstract
A prominent mathematician recently sent me an article he had written and asked me for my reaction. After studying it, I said that he was proposing a mathematical “product” and that as such it stood in the scientific marketplace in competition with nearby products. He bridled and was incensed by my use of the word “product” to describe his work. Our correspondence terminated. What follows is an elaboration of what I mean by mathematical products and how I situate them within the mathematical enterprise.
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O’Halloran, K. L. (2005). Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images. London and New York: Continuum.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2015). The Language of Learning Mathematics: A Multimodal Perspective. The Journal of Mathematical Behaviour. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2014.09.002
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Davis, P.J. (2015). Mathematical products. In: Davis, E., Davis, P. (eds) Mathematics, Substance and Surmise. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21473-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21473-3_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21472-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21473-3
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