Abstract
The concept of style started to be systematically used in history and philosophy of science in the works of Thomas Kuhn (with his concept of ‘paradigm’) and Alistair Cameron Crombie in his Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (1994). Proceeding from our interpretation of proofs as “proof-events” that take place in space and time, we approach anew the question of style in mathematics and the communicative functions of styles of proving. Proof-events are social events that generate proofs presented in different styles that describe specific mathematical practices and characterise different cultures or schools that may differ in their views of rigour.In this paper, we attempt to analyse the communicative functions of mathematical proving styles by appealing to Roman Jakobson’s communication model, modified for the case of proof-events. In the framework of this model, we can discuss such questions as intelligibility of proofs, their elegance, etc. and elucidate their significance in education.
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