Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a study of the epistemologies of seventy research mathematicians utilising a model containing five categories, socio-cultural relatedness, aesthetics, intuition, thinking style and connectivities. The perspectives of the mathematicians demonstrate extreme variability from one to another but certain persistent themes carry important messages for mathematics education. In particular, although mathematicians research very differently, their pervasive absolutist view of mathematical knowledge is not matched by their stories of how they come to know, nor of how they think about mathematics.

Citations