Spiritual aspirations connected with mathematics; the experience of American University students

SciTech Book News, March, 2008

Spiritual aspirations connected with mathematics; the experience of American University students.

Witz, Klaus G.

Edwin Mellen Pr.

2007

431 pages

$129.95

Hardcover

QA8

What draws people to study mathematics? The money? The power? According to Witz (education, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), a very real part of the draw are beauty and truth. To the mathematical mind, the elegance of the mathematical project is reason alone for study, along with talent and the sheer audacity of being right. Witz finds other significant reasons for studying math or making it a career in his intensive interviews with students, including their need for an intellectual challenge and their need to understand the human being as a whole. Witz details the interview project, which included teacher education students, and analyzes the responses from individual responders. He also finds a rather surprising thread that seems to run through many responses, which is almost entirely metaphysical in nature. Math majors want to know what happens across the universe, and their attraction is generally metaphysical as well as practical.

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