Inventing the Mathematician: Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics

Inventing the Mathematician: Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics
ISBN-10
1438460112
ISBN-13
9781438460116
Category
Mathematics
Pages
192
Language
English
Published
2016-03-01
Publisher
SUNY Press
Author
Sara N. Hottinger

Description

Considers how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. Where and how do we, as a culture, get our ideas about mathematics and about who can engage with mathematical knowledge? Sara N. Hottinger uses a cultural studies approach to address how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. She considers four locations in which representations of mathematics contribute to our cultural understanding of mathematics: mathematics textbooks, the history of mathematics, portraits of mathematicians, and the field of ethnomathematics. Hottinger examines how these discourses shape mathematical subjectivity by limiting the way some groups—including women and people of color—are able to see themselves as practitioners of math. Inventing the Mathematician provides a blueprint for how to engage in a deconstructive project, revealing the limited and problematic nature of the normative construction of mathematical subjectivity.

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