Text is a crucial medium for transferring mathematical ideas, agendas, and results within the scientific community and in educational contexts. This makes the focus on mathematical texts a natural and important part of the philosophical study of mathematics. Moreover, research on mathematical texts can take advantage of the huge body of knowledge and toolbox of methods from other disciplines such as linguistics and computer science to investigate problems in the philosophy of mathematics. Linguistically informed research addresses general questions of the philosophy of mathematics. Among those philosophical questions are the following, including methodological reflections on this approach.
● What are mathematical proofs, and which role does their textual representation play for mathematical communication and theorizing?
● How have mathematical concepts developed historically?
● What is the role of metaphor in mathematical practice?
● How do argumentative foundations change historically?
● How are mathematical objects conceptualized: is there a difference between formal and textual approaches?
● (How) Do tools like LaTeX, blogs, and forums influence mathematical practice?
This topical collection aims to bring together and build bridges between researchers from different methodological backgrounds to tackle questions concerning the philosophy of mathematics. This includes approaches from philosophical analysis, linguistics (e.g., corpus studies) and literature studies, but also methods from computer science and artificial intelligence (e.g., big data approaches and natural language processing), cognitive sciences, and mathematics education).
The impressive progress in natural language processing on the one side and automated theorem proving on the other side make it attractive to develop good models of mathematical texts to make use of state of the art techniques for better tooling in documenting and developing mathematics.
The language of mathematics as a technical jargon or as a special natural language with a rich structure is an important test-case for practical and theoretical study of language, and also has consequences for the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematical practice.
In this collection, we target mathematical text in a broad sense, including written interaction such as blogs, forums, reviews as well as textbooks and research articles.