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Are aesthetic judgements purely aesthetic? Testing the social conformity account

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posted on 2020-04-06, 11:13 authored by Matthew InglisMatthew Inglis, Andrew Aberdein
Many of the methods commonly used to research mathematical practice, such as analyses of historical episodes or individual cases, are particularly well-suited to generating causal hypotheses, but less well-suited to testing causal hypotheses. In this paper we reflect on the contribution that the so-called hypothetico-deductive method, with a particular focus on experimental studies, can make to our understanding of mathematical practice. By way of illustration, we report an experiment that investigated how mathematicians attribute aesthetic properties to mathematical proofs. We demonstrate that perceptions of the aesthetic properties of mathematical proofs are, in some cases at least, subject to social influence. Specifically, we show that mathematicians’ aesthetic judgements tend to conform to the judgements made by others. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

ZDM

Volume

52

Issue

6

Pages

1127 - 1136

Publisher

Springer

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acceptance date

2020-04-04

Publication date

2020-04-12

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

1863-9690

eISSN

1863-9704

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Matthew Inglis. Deposit date: 4 April 2020

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