RUME 14 (Volume 2)
2011
Portland, Oregon
THE PHYSICALITY OF SYMBOL USE
Page: 314
We propose viewing the ways in which people use symbols and drawings as having an intrinsic physicality. When perceived as an extension of gesture-making, symbol use can give us insight into how symbol users experience the mathematics they’re considering. To illustrate this, we apply this lens to examine selections from a video-recorded interview of a mathematician regarding one of his published papers. This results in several phenomenological characterizations of the mathematician’s embodied symbol use that, in turn, offer potential insight into many instances of symbol use beyond this single case study.