1997/06/01 by James Robert Brown
Mathematics · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #History and Theory of Mathematics #Philosophy and History of Science #Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques
paper · doi:10.1093/bjps/48.2.161
Everyone appreciates a clever mathematical picture, but the prevailing attitude is one of scepticism: diagrams, illustrations, and pictures prove nothing; they are psychologically important and heuristically useful, but only a traditional verbal/symbolic proof provides genuine evidence for a purported theorem. Like some other recent writers (Barwise and Etchemendy [1991]; Shin [1994]; and Giaquinto [1994]) I take a different view and argue, from historical considerations and some striking examples, for a positive evidential role for pictures in mathematics.