Approaching Proof in a Community of Mathematical Practice

Mathematical proof is a current issue in mathematicseducation research and there is a renewed emphasis on proof in theongoing revisions of school curricula in many countries. This bookoffers a fresh perspective on the subject. It describes students'encounters with proof at a mathematics department in Sweden. Theempirical data ranges from students' survey responses, transcriptsof interviews with both lecturers and students to observationprotocols of lectures and instructional material like textbooks andexaminations. A main contribution of the book is a new theoreticalframe that shows how a social practice approach can usefully becombined with theories about proof obtained from earliermathematics education research. This frame was developed to analysethe data and structure the results, but has a much wider scope. Inparticular it allows the author to vividly describe the complexityof mathematical instruction and explain the contradictory views ofproof in the empirical material. This book serves as anintroduction to the field and will be of interest tomathematicians, mathematics educators, teacher educators, theauthors of curricula as well as students in mathematics.