Investigating Combinatorial Provers’ Reasoning about Multiplication

Abstract

Combinatorial proof is an important topic both for combinatorics education and proof education researchers, but relatively little has been studied about the teaching and learning of combinatorial proof. In this paper, we focus on one specific phenomenon that emerged during interviews with mathematicians and students who were experienced provers as they discussed and engaged in combinatorial proof. In particular, participants used a wide variety of cognitive models to interpret multiplication by a constant when reasoning about binomial identities, some of which seemed to be more (or less) effective in helping produce a combinatorial proof. We present these cognitive models and describe episodes that illustrate implications of these cognitive models for our participants’ work on proving binomial identities. Our findings both inform research on combinatorial proof and highlight the importance of understanding subtleties of the familiar operation of multiplication.