Personal Reflections on Mathematics and Mathematics Education

What ain’t mathematics education?!

Abstract: In 1996 at the first Iranian Mathematics Education Conference (IMEC1) that was held in Isfahan. I obliged myself as a mathematics educator, to inform the mathematics community at large by presenting a paper entitled “what is mathematics education?” to pave the way for the establishment of the master program of mathematics education in Iran. Now, after 16 years, we need to reflect on t...

Reflections on Mathematics∗

Though the philosophy of mathematics encompasses many kinds of questions, my response to the five questions primarily focuses on the prospects of developing a unified approach to the metaphysical and epistemological issues concerning mathematics. My answers will be framed from within a single conceptual framework. By ‘conceptual framework’, I mean an explicit and formal listing of primitive not...

Philosophy of Mathematics, Mathematics Education, and Philosophy of Mathematics Education

Mathematics and Real Life: Reflections on Teaching Mathematics

Mathematicians a hundred years ago would have had no difficulty in giving convincing answersfor many of them were involved in interdisciplinary research. For historical reasons, Mathematics had to undergo a period of intense introspection from which it is only now emerging. Most of us have thus grown up doing mathematics for its own sake, because we enjoy doing it and it satisfies our basic des...

Mathematics, Mathematicians, and Mathematics Education

I am one of a growing number of research mathematicians who are substantially engaged with school mathematics education. Such outreach has a long and honorable tradition. In this lecture, I illustrate some of the ways that I think this can be helpful, and even essential. Upon his retirement in 1990 as president of the ICMI, Jean Pierre Kahane spoke perceptively of the intimate connection betwee...