The Body in Mathematics

An embodied perspective on mathematical thinking, teaching and learning has grown from early theoretical and empirical work in the 90’s to a diverse and productive collection of approaches today. The aim of this book is to survey the landscape of these approaches and to provide empirical examples of research and an in-depth analysis of the most influential perspectives on embodiment and mathematics. More particularly, the book clarifies differences and points of contact among several theoretical and methodological frameworks that all take embodiment as a core construct in understanding mathematical thinking, and illustrates in a concrete way the affordances of each of these frameworks.

Contributors are: Dor Abrahamson, Martha W. Alibali, Corey Brady, James A. Dixon, Laurie Edwards, Virginia J. Flood, Susan Gerofsky, Christina Krause, Ricardo Nemirovsky, Matthew Petersen, Luis Radford, Wolff-Michael Roth, Anna Shvarts, and Ashwin Vaidya.

Laurie D. Edwards is Professor of Education, Emerita at Saint Mary's College of California. Her research addresses learning and cognition, embodiment, and the multiple modalities involved in doing, teaching, and learning mathematics. She is particularly interested in gesture and cognitive linguistics in mathematics.

Christina M. Krause is Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Graz in Austria. Her research centers around the topics of language, embodiment, and multimodality in mathematics thinking and learning, integrating both individual and social perspectives, with a particular interest in understandings and practices of diversity and inclusion related to mathematics education.