PROCEEDINGS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2019
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Mathematicians’ metaphors for describing mathematical practice
Page: 467
In the literature on metaphor, researchers have pointed out the importance of metaphor as a tool for sense-making and have demonstrated the impact of metaphor use on cognition. In mathematics in particular, metaphor has been shown to be a valuable tool for making sense of and reasoning with mathematics. To our knowledge, there has been no research on the metaphors that professors use when communicating the nature of mathematical practice to students in advanced mathematics lectures. In this paper, we present a particular metaphor, Learning Mathematics is a Journey, that we found in a corpus of 11 advanced mathematics lectures. We describe this metaphor we found and offer some speculative analysis regarding the implications of this metaphor.