Introduction: How Does a Person Become a Mathematician?

Abstract

In this first chapter we introduce our overall aim: to understand how a person, often a student, goes through the process of becoming a mathematician, and how he or she comes to think of themselves as a mathematician. Over the course of more than a decade, with a number of colleagues in university education, we have grappled with various aspects of mathematics education. We have investigated our students’ learning and our own pedagogical approaches, the curriculum we design and the mathematics that we present, the utility of mathematical knowledge and processes for learners’ careers, and the concept of mathematical identity and what this implies for the process of becoming a mathematician. In the course of our investigations we have discovered (as many others have before us) that there are no simple solutions to the problems of how to help students to learn mathematics and to develop a mathematical identity. In this and the following chapters we describe some of our approaches to these problems and some of the results we have obtained. A key feature of these approaches and results is that they are firmly based on the experiences of mathematics learners, related to us in interviews and surveys in their own words, and included in most of our chapters in the form of verbatim quotes. In this way, we include the voices of learners of mathematics and recent graduates from degrees in the mathematical sciences.