The Mathematical Drawing/Diagram: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

The mathematician’s life revolves around proving theorems, mainly, but at the same time the mathematician is a creator of visual objects, of drawings. Artifacts of the main action—the proof—these drawings are rarely saved, or published. And yet, it is often the case that the idea of the proof cannot be understood without the drawing, either in the form of a concrete token or in the form of a mental image. The proof seems to be inherently pictorial.

What is one to make of these drawings, whose transient presence is so important to the practice? In this workshop we consider the mathematical drawing/diagram from multiple perspectives: philosophical, art historical, and mathematical.

Organisers:
Juliette Kennedy, Jouko Väänänen

Contact person: 
juliette.kennedy@helsinki.fi

Speakers:
Andrew Arana (Université de Lorraine), María Clara Cortés (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Juliet Floyd (Boston University), Emmylou Haffner (CNRS), Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Harvard), Menachem Magidor (Jerusalem), Rahman Mohammadpour (Vienna), Reviel Netz (Stanford), Philip Ording (Sarah Lawrence), Juhani Pallasmaa (Helsinki), Sarah Pourciau (Duke), Silvia de Toffoli (IUSS Pavia), Andrés Villaveces (Universidad Nacional de Colombia)