CHAPTER 3: The Role of the Aesthetic in Mathematical Problem Solving¹

The role of aesthetics in human understanding has received considerable attention over the past few decades. Many scholars have contributed to broadening the formerly elitist, frivolous, and objectivist connotations of aesthetics. They have argued that aesthetic considerations are as fundamental—and perhaps even more so—to human experience as are cognitive, affective, and social ones. Some of these scholars draw heavily on recent theories of embodied cognition, which recognize the centrality of the body in human thinking, even in the very abstract domain of mathematics (Johnson, 2007). Others have focused on the inevitable infusion of values in everyday decision making and inferencing values that are ethical and aesthetic in nature and that determine what we count as special, important, or worth knowing in any area of inquiry, including mathematics (Dewey, 1934; Dissanayake, 1992). Values, morals, and ethics influence the way children solve mathematical problems and shape their mathematical behavior (DeBellis & Goldin, 1997).