In a recent blog post , I talked about the particular mental representation (“dry bones”) of math that we use when we are being “rigorous” – we think of mathematical objects as inert, not changing and affecting nothing. There is a reason why we use this representation, and I didn’t say anything about that.

Rigor requires that we use classical logical reasoning: The logical connectives, implication in particular, are defined by truth tables. They have no temporal or causal connotations. That is not like everyday reasoning about things that affect each other and change over time. (See Note 1).

Example: “A smooth function that is increasing at $x = a$ and decreasing at $x = b$ has to turn around at some point $m$ between $a$ and $b$. Being smooth, its derivative must be $0$ at $m$ and its second derivative must be negative near m since the slope changes from positive to negative, so m must occur at a maximum”. This is a convincing intuitive argument that depends on our understanding of smooth functions, but it would not be called “rigorous” by many of us. If someone demands a complete rigorous proof we probably start arguing with epsilons and deltas, and our arguments will be about the function and its values and derivatives as static objects, each thought of as an unchanging whole mathematical object just sitting there for our inspection. That is the dry-bones representation.

In other words, we use the dry bones representation to make classical first order logic correct, in the sense that classical reasoning about the statements we make become sound, as they are obviously not in everyday reasoning.

This point may have implications for mathematical education at the level where we teach proofs. Perhaps we should be open with students about images and metaphors, about how they suggest applications and suggest what may be true, but they have to “go dead” when we set out to prove something rigorously. We have been doing exactly that at the blackboard in front of our students, but we rarely point it out explicitly. It is not automatically the case that this explicit approach will turn out to help very many students, but it is worth investigating. (See Note 2).

It may also have implications for the philosophy of math.

Note 1: The statement “If you eat all your dinner you can have dessert” does not fit the truth table for classical (material) implication in ordinary discourse, where it means: “You can’t have dessert until you eat your dinner”. Not only is there a temporal element here, but there is a causal element which makes the statement false if the hypothesis and conclusion are both false. Some philosophers say that implication in English has classical implication as its primary meaning, but idiomatic usage modifies it according to context. I find that hard to believe. I don’t believe any translation is going on in your head when you hear that sentence: you get its nonclassical meaning immediately and directly with no thought of the classical vacuous-implication idea.

Note 2: I used to think that being explicit about the semiotic aspects of various situations that take place in the classroom could only help students, but in fact it appears to scare some of them. “I can’t listen to what you say AND keep in mind the subject matter AND keep in mind rules about the differences in syntax and semantics in mathematical discourse AND keep in mind that the impersonality of the discourse may trigger alienation in my soul AND…” This needs investigation.

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In my abstract math website here I wrote about “two levels of images and metaphors” in math, the rich and the rigorous. There are several things wrong with that presentation and I intend to rewrite it. This post is a first attempt to get things straight.

When we are trying to understand or explain math, we may use various kinds of images and metaphors about the subject matter to construct a colorful and rich representation of the mathematical objects and processes involved. I described some of these briefly in the previous post on representations.

When we set out to prove some math statement, we go into what I called “rigorous mode”. We feel that we have to forget about all the color and excitement of the rich view. We must think of math objects as totally inert and static. The don’t move or change over time and they don’t interact with other objects or the real world. In other words, pretend that all math objects are dead.

We don’t always go all the way into this rigorous mode, but if we use an image or metaphor in a proof and someone challenges us about it, we may rewrite that part to get rid of the colorful representation and replace it by a calculation or line of reasoning that refers to the math objects as if they were inert and static – dead.

I now think that “rigorous mode” is a misleading description. The description of math objects as inert and static is just another representation. We need a name for this representation; I thought about using “the dead representation” and “the leached out representation” (the name comes from a remark by Steven Pinker), but my working name in this post is the dry bones representation (from the book of Ezekiel).

Well, there is a sense in which the dry bones representation is not just another representation. It is unusual because it is a representation of every mathematical object. Most representations, images, metaphors, models of math objects apply only to some objects. You can say that the function $y = 25 – t^2$ “rises and then falls” but you can’t say the monster group rises and falls. The dry bones representation applies to all objects. Its representation of that function, or of the monster group, is that it is one object, all there all at once, not changing, not affecting anything, a kind of

When we do math, we hold several representations of what we are working with in our heads all at once. When writing about them we use metaphors in passing, perhaps implicitly. We use symbolic representations embedded in the prose as well as graphs and other visual representations, fluently and usually without much explicit notice. One of those representations is the dry bones representation. It is specially associated with rigorous reasoning, but other representations occur in mathematical reasoning as well. To call it a “mode” is to suggest that it is the only thing happening, and that is not always true. In fact I suspect that it the dry bones representation is rarely the only representation around, but that would require lexicographical work on a mathematical corpus (another kind of dead body!).

I expect to rewrite the chapter on images and metaphors to capture these ideas, as well as to give it more prominence instead of being buried in the middle of a discussion of the general idea of images and metaphors.

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