We are delighted that Susan Staats of the University of Minnesota will be coming to the BSRLM Spring conference to collect the Janet Duffin Award for 2017 and deliver a lecture based on her paper:
‘The poetics of argumentation: the relevance of conversational repetition for two theories of emergent mathematical reasoning’, which appeared in RME Volume 19, Issue 3.
The BSRLM Spring Conference will be held on Saturday 9th March 9th at the Open University in Milton Keynes.
Susan comes from a background of both cultural anthropology and maths. Her interests include the linguistics of collaborative problem solving and theoretically she uses an anthroplogical approach, the ethnography of speaking, to analyse mathematical dialogue.
The title and abstract for Susan’s talk at the conference will be:
Two Claudes and a Clyde: Stories at the confluence of poetics and mathematics discourse
Speakers sometimes use the orderliness of rhetorical structure to express the orderliness that they sense in a mathematical task. Commonplace examples are poetic structures, linguistic resources in which speakers create a sense of discursive cohesion by repeating some of the grammatical structure and words of a previous comment. In this presentation, I provide an overview of work so far on poetic analysis of mathematics discourse. Speakers use poetic structures to accomplish a variety of mathematical needs, such as warranting assertions, generalizing, adjusting the form of variables, and transitioning from spoken to written forms of a variable. I share commentary on the surprising academic history that links mathematics and poetics with just a touch of scandal, and which points to a highly interdisciplinary future for this area of study.
Note the lecture will be streamed live via this link.
A button will appear to access the live stream shortly before the talk is scheduled to begin.