During the last few years, there has been significantly improving interest in something known as “mathematics and/in culture” or even “mathematical culture” in the history and viewpoint of mathematics. Thoughts of “culture” have already been used in the record of the sciences in arithmetic knowledge analysis for some time, but they are relatively new in the history of mathematics. Yet, they are incredibly exciting as I see them providing a two-fold promise:
On the one side, focus on mathematics and/in culture allows for the further analysis of mathematics as an individual action programmed and formed by the culture which it is created and impacting that culture in return. For a long time, mathematics has been designed so that it belong to a separated world — to Ivory Tower so to speak, as it were, perhaps limited by its situations, but providing little with regards to impact on wider culture. However, latest improvements in analysis have permitted us to remedy that scenario and analysis resemblances and impacts between different factors of culture such as mathematics, literary works, art, and science. On the other hand, the idea of societies within mathematics provides us with a device box for examining traditional improvements in math that are not so quickly taken under other techniques of study such as conventional periodizations, paradigms, analysis programs, designs, or even methods.
Lately, a number of educational conventions and classes have been dedicated to such conversations. They are important not only for scholarly research of the history and viewpoint of mathematics, but also for the present. Social techniques, so it seems, offer a way of making mathematics available for a wider audience by linking it with a scaffold of current cultural information of literary works, history, art, social and scientific topics and so on. Therefore, it is also of importance to upper secondary education where advertising mathematics in trans-disciplinary segments with other factors of European culture is growing as a new task.