The MACAS Symposiums 2005 – 2019. Mathematics Education in an Interdisciplinary Context

Author(s):  
Claus Michelsen

The symposium series Mathematics and its Connections to the Arts and Sciences (MACAS) has been held since 2005. The vision which the MACASinitiative is based upon is to develop a humanistic approach to education that combines various disciplines in a single curriculum. According to this vision the aim is to educate students by enabling them to pursue diverse fields of research, while at the same time exploring the aesthetic and scientific connections between the arts and science. In view of the challenges of the 21st century, a modern approach to education with a focus on multi- and interdisciplinarity is more important than ever. Five MACAS symposiums have been held since 2005, and the proceedings of the symposiums provide an insight into ideas, experiences, conceptual frameworks, and theories to connect mathematics education to the arts and sciences. Based on the symposiums proceedings we provide an overview of five main themes addressed at the MACAS symposiums (i) mathematics and science (ii) mathematics and art (iii) mathematics and technology, (iv) mathematics and literature, and (v) educational perspectives on interdisciplinarity. The overview highlights the need for joint empirical investigations that operationalize, model and study the rich ideas presented in at the symposiums.

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-694
Author(s):  
ÁINE KELLY

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare'sKing Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli'sThe Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of hisoeuvreboth casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
John Hughson

Football is widely referred to as the ‘beautiful game’. This gives the impression that the sport can be aesthetically appreciated by its human observers. However, while many people might acknowledge that some of the physical movements made by top level football players exhibit grace, even beauty, this does not equate to football being accepted as a form of culture comparable to other areas of human activity described collectively as ‘the arts’. While this article takes an interest in philosophical inquiry into the aesthetic possibilities of football, it is primarily concerned with a sociological explanation as to how football has become ‘artified’. In doing so, the article draws upon the concept ‘artification’ as developed by Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich. The approach is not concerned with definitions of art according to aesthetic criteria or notions of appreciation, but with ‘how and under what circumstances art comes about’. This requires examining football in relation to discernible ‘constituent processes’ of artification. For reasons explained in the article, the contextual focus is on the artification of football in England. Artification is not a closed and finished matter. In that it can be said to have occurred, artification must be balanced against ‘de-artification’ in the form of potentially countervailing tendencies. Such consideration is taken up in the conclusion, via reflection upon the damaging impact of the excesses of commercial organisational control. Overall, artification is advocated as a sociological model that offers insight into the cultural significance of football in contemporary life.


2020 ◽  

The Cultural History of Memory in the Eighteenth Century places in sharp relief the contrast between inspiring ideas that heralded an auspicious future and immemorial traditions that cherished a vanishing past. Waxing large during that era was the European Enlightenment, with its projects for reform and optimistic forecasts about the prospect of making a better world. Heritage was reframed, as martyrs for the cause of religious liberty and heroes for the promotion of the arts and sciences were enshrined in a new pantheon. They served as icons marking a pathway toward a presumed destiny, amid high hopes that reason would triumph over superstition to guide the course of human affairs. Such sentiments gave reformers a new sense of collective identity as an imagined community acting in the name of progress. Against this backdrop, this volume addresses a variety of themes in memory’s multi-faceted domain, among them mnemonic schemes in the transition from theist to scientific cosmologies; memory remodeled in the making of print culture; memory’s newfound resources for introspection; politics reimagined for the modern age; the nature of tradition reconceived; the aesthetics of nostalgia for an aristocracy clinging to a tenuous identity; the lure of far-away places; trauma in an age of revolution; and the emerging divide between history and collective memory. Along the way, contributors address such topics as the idea of nation in early modern politics; the aesthetic vision of Hubert Robert in his garden landscapes; the transforming effects of the interaction between mind and its mnemonic satellites in print media; Shakespeare remembered and commemorated; the role of memory in the redesign of historiography; the mediation of high and popular culture through literature; soul-searching in female autobiography; and commemorative practices during the French Revolution.


1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clark

The ArgumentThe Doctor of Philosophy, a nonmedieval academic figure who spread throughout the globe in the Modern Era, and who emblemized the transformation of academic knowledge into the “pursuit of research,” emerged through a long and tortuous path in the early modern Germanies. The emergence and recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy would be correlative with the nineteenth-century professionalization of the arts and sciences. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the earlier Doctors and older “professional” faculties from the medieval university — Theology, Law, and Medicine — opposed recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy. In Saxony, the forces of “medievalism” were able to block recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy, and they retained the degraded Master of Arts or Philosophy as the highest degree in arts and sciences. Forces of “modernism” prevailed, however, in Austria and Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Austria, the Doctor of Philosophy arrived as a wholly modern figure, the creation of a nice dossier and a civil service examination: the medieval “juridical” persona became a modern “bureaucratic” persona. Between this bureaucratic modernism of the Austrians and corporatist medievalism of the Saxons, the Prussians pursued a via media. Unlike the Saxons, they recognized the Doctor of Philosophy; but unlike the Austrians, they did not completely bureaucratize the candidate's persona. The Prussians demanded from the candidate a “work of research,” a doctoral dissertation, which exhibited the aesthetic qualities of the Romantic artist: originality and personality.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Płaszczewska

Summary This is an attempt at examining Zygmunt Krasiński’s opinions and preferences with regard to the fine arts, a theme many critics believed to be missing from his writings. While putting things right, this article looks at the issues involved in his artistic choices, for example, what works or artists attracted his attention, in general, and to the point of him actually drawing on them in his own work or provoking him to some response (critical, approving, emotional, etc.). Furthermore, the article tries to explore the reasons and circumstances which may account for Krasiński’s interest in a given painting, print, or sculpture. It may have been the work’s theme as in the case of his ekphrasis of Ary Scheffer’s Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca and Paolo Di Rimini, where literary tradition provided the impulse, or the mode of its execution, or the personal ties with its author, or, finally, some other factors, like a current vogue or simply Krasiński’s individual sensitivity. The ultimate aim of all these inquiries is to outline Krasiński’s relationship with the arts (beaux arts) in the context of the aesthetic preferences of the epoch.


Author(s):  
Tom McLeish

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.


Modernism and Non-Translation proposes a new way of reading key modernist texts, including the work of canonical figures such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. The topic of this book is the incorporation of untranslated fragments from various languages within modernist writing. It explores non-translation in modernist fiction, poetry, and other forms, with a principally European focus. The intention is to begin to answer a question that demands collective expertise: what are the aesthetic and cultural implications of non-translation for modernist literature? How did non-translation shape the poetics, and cultural politics, of some of the most important writers of this period? Twelve essays by leading scholars of modernism explore American, British, and Irish texts, alongside major French and German writers, and the wider modernist recovery of Classical languages. They explore non-translation from the dual perspectives of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, unsettling that false opposition, and articulating in the process their individuality of expression and experience. The range explored indicates something of the reach and vitality of the matter of translation—and specifically non-translation—across a selection of poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose, while focusing on mainly canonical voices. Offering a series of case studies, the volume aims to encourage further exploration of connections across languages and among writers. Together, the collection seeks to provoke and extend debate on the aesthetic, cultural, political, and conceptual dimensions of non-translation as an important yet hitherto neglected facet of modernism, helping to redefine our understanding of that movement. It demonstrates the rich possibilities of reading modernism through instances of non-translation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 567-567
Author(s):  
Angel Duncan

Abstract This session identifies common misconceptions about identity for persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Going beyond diagnostic brain imaging and neurocognitive testing, case studies and research in creativity from around the United States highlights consciousness of persons living with ADRD. Reviewing and discussing artworks is aimed to set dialogue in the question of where memory deposits emerge when engaged in creativity. Through art therapy techniques, this type of self-expression may provide new avenues in treatment for dementia care. Exploring the arts from those with Mild Cognitive Impairment to late stage Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia, consciousness seems to remain intact despite neural death. This session aims to discourage poor spending allocations and establishing meaningful care. From clinical research trials to creativity of self-expression, the importance of why the arts and sciences matter are demonstrated as effective modalities that enhance quality of life.


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