THE THREE WORLD

OF MATHEMATICS
 1)THE THREE
WORLD
A world of embodiment building
on human perceptions and actions
developing mental images
verbalized in increasingly
sophisticated ways to become
perfect mental entities in our
imagination.
A world of symbolism developing
from embodiment human actions
into symbolic procedures of
calculation and manipulation that
may be compressed into procepts
to enables flexible operational
thinking.

CONCEPTUAL OPERATIONAL

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A world of formalism building at eti par logy
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AXIOMATIC
 2) EMBODIMENT
‘Embodiment’ can refer to :
• A concrete representation on an
abstract concepts.
• Producing equipment to represent
abstract mathematical concept
(Zoltan Dienes)

The embodiment can be taken further

to introduce larger numbers in The essential idea is to see the decimal
thousands, millions and billions by places as being fixed and the digits being
placing extra groups of three more shifted.
zero to the left.

Diene’s blocks

To encourage children to conceptualize the idea of place

value Diene used blocks with different bases and
This help child to see all the digits in a number
embodiment with different structures
as whole rather than the commonly held view
 2.1 IDEAS FROM
PHILOSOPHY & COGNITIVE
SCIENCE
 Plato asserted that there was a perfect world beyond our
human existence.
 Descartes making a clear distinction between the brain with
its human limitations and the mind with its awareness of the
human soul.
 1990, President Bush senior declared the last decade of the
20th century to e decade of the brain.
 1992, Nobel Prize Winner Gerald Edelmen published “Bright
Air Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind”  individual
brains develops according to Darwinian evolution.
 1994, Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick published “ The
Astonishing Hypothesis : The Search For The Soul”  the
product of the process of the biological brains
 (George Lakoff and friend) All thought is embodied & based
on our sensory-motor reception
 2002, M.Donald produced A Mind So Rare, analysing the
maturation of various levels of consciousness in evolving
species.
 the framework proposed in this booked build from sensory-
motor operation into conceptual embodiment.
2.3 OPERATIONA IN
EMBODIMENT & SYMBOLISM
Mathematical thinking builds initially through making
sense of our perceptions and actions
An actions performed with a specific purposed will be
call an operation.
Often the notion of operation is linked to the
operations that perform in in arithmetic algebra.
Some occasions focus on effects of the operations or
operation itself.
Operating in more subtle ways such as putting set
together and adding the number of element.
Where it involves a shift to a new way of thinking,
focusing not on the properties of the object but
through a process of operational abstraction to
determine the properties of the operations
themselves.
 3)THE WORLD OF
CONCEPTUAL
EMBODIMENT
Conceptual embodiment grows from the child’
experience of everyday perception and action.
The journey through geometry in school builds
on the set before of recognition of similarities
and differences to categorize shapes analysed
in chapter 4 as a succession of structural
abstraction through the practical
mathematics of recognition and description,
then on to the theoretical mathematics of
definition and Euclidean proof.
4) THR TRANSITION FROM
EMBODIMENT TO OPERATIONAL
SYMBOLISM
The world of operational
symbolism grows out of
embodiment by focusing on
actions on objects rather
than the objects themselves.
The relationship between
embodiment symbolism in
arithmetic & algebra is more
complex than the structural
embodiment of geometry.
The curriculum is often designed to build up starting with the natural
numbers, steadily expanding to rational, negative number, rational
numbers real numbers and even to the complex numbers.
Each extended number system is an extension blend that involves
supportive aspects that enables generalization and problematic
aspects that are potential impediments to progress.
 4.1 THEORETICAL
ASPECTS OF ARITHMETIC
When operation are combined, it
becomes necessary to use brackets to
specify the order of operation
4.2 THE TRANSITION FORM
ARITHMETIC TO ALGEBRA
Algebra involves a switch from the embodiment of real world
problem to manipulation of algebra symbolism

eg The process of solving the equation does not depend consciously

  :
Traditionally the convention is to read
the operations from left to right and
take account of the order of precedence
in which one perform first BIDMAS
on the underlying embodiment, but operates in the world using
the relationship between the symbols to be manipulated.
The changing focus of attention – from embodiment to symbolism,
to manipulate the symbols, then back to embodiment to interpret
the solution may be a natural consequence of the limited focus of
attention of the human brain.

4.3 THEORETICAL ASPECT OF ALGEBRA

The generalization from  
arithmetic to algebra
uses observed
properties of operations
in arithmetic,
reformulated as
theoretical ‘rules of
arithmetic’.
Commulative laws The generalization to fractional
and negative powers is
significant step in sophistication
Associative laws
from using the symbol to
describe the power law for
Distributive laws whole numbers to define the
power law to make deductions in
more general case.
Its signals the
signigficant change
from the practical
mathematics based on
natural experiences to
theoretical
mathematics based on
definition and proof.
4.4 STRUCTURAL ASPECT OF OPERATIONAL SYMBOLISM
The long term development of operational symbolism
follows the broad sequence of structural abstraction

1. Recognition
of properties 2. Description 3.bDefinition of 4. Deduction
of operations of properties rules operations of identities
in arithmetic

• The development of arithmetic and algebra is then revealed as a blend of operational abstraction.
• The terms of ‘operational’ and ‘structural’ are used to specify the alternation of operational compression
into concept that then have structure.

The
  traditional approach is
a blend of geometry,
arithmetic and algebra to
find the slope of a function
The idea of a quantity becoming
arbitrarily small is problematic
where in history when Newton
and Leibniz were criticized for
failing to give a logical meaning
to the limit concept.
It is a problematic for
students in school, who
imagine the process of a
sequence of numbers
tending to zero giving a
limit that is almost zero.

4.5 REAL NUMBERS, LIMITS AND THE CALCULUS

 5) THE AXIOMATIC FORMAL WORLD
 Hilbert realized that reason could be applied to an axiomatic structure given only in terms of formal set theoretic
axiomatic and definitions that did not depend on the underlying nature of the phenomena involved.
 This involves a total reversal meaning. Instead of studying objects or operations that have (natural)
properties, the chosen properties (axioms) are specified first and the structure is shown to have other
properties that can be deduced from the axioms.

  In the formal world, the statement is assumed as an axiom, and how it is performed is
now irrelevant, what matters is that the axiom is satisfied.

5.1) VARIOUS MEANINGS OF THE TERM ‘FORMAL’

The word ‘formal’ is used in different ways in mathematics and mathematics education ;

In mathematics it is used to describe In mathematics education, the term ‘formal’ often refer to
the approach advocated by Hilbert. the formal operational stage of Piaget’s Theory.

Broad outline of some of the aspects of the

full development of mathematical thinking.
 Mathematicians are often suspicious of intuitive ideas precisely because they consider
them subject to hidden assumptions that may invalidate their argument.

 To grasp the full extent of mathematical thinking, from the early ideas of the child to the
highest level of rigor, it is necessary to take account of the full landscape of mathematics.

 Although mathematical object Cn be constructed in various ways, through categorization,

encapsulation or definition, there is a broad sequence of development in four stages :

Recognition of Description of
properties of properties perceived in
thinkable concept the given context.

Definition of properties Deduction of properties from

that are now used as a definitions using specified
basis for identification methods of proof (Euclidean,
and construction of algebraic and formal) to build un
thinkable concept. integrated knowledge structure,
 The bleeding of
three mental worlds
of mathematics
The overall framework
for the development of Based on human
thinking has been recognition
established through
Repetition
7) THE STORY
In shifting to new
SO FAR contexts, aspect that are Language to evolve
supportive in one through perception,
situation may be operation and reason
supportive or problematic
in another.

Related emotions affect the long term development with supportive

aspect encouraging confidence and problematic aspects being seen
either as a challenge by those who are confident or as a source of
concern for those who may attempt to gain success by rote-learning
ou
or descend into a spiral of mathematical anxiety.
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