POM SIGMAA



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POM SIGMAA official business meeting

POM SIGMAA had a Zoom business meeting on Feb. 1, 2024, 8 pm (Eastern), 5 pm (Pacific).
Meeting Recording

Agenda

  1. Welcome and introductions of new officers
  2. News for SIGMAAs
    • More flexibility for use of funds at non-MAA events (like JMM)
    • POMSIGMAA is undergoing a periodic review by the Committee on SIGMAAs
  3. Remarks/wrap-up from JMM 2024
  4. Programming for upcoming meetings
    • Mathfest 2024: Contributed Paper Session on "How My Philosophy of Mathematics Affects My Teaching" and guest speaker Tim Bays of Notre Dame
    • JMM 2025: looking for ideas
  5. Other POMSIGMAA activities: suggested virtual reading group
  6. Next Business Meeting: We are tentatively planning an in-person business meeting at Mathfest 2024

Joint Math Meeetings
January 3-6, 2024
San Francisco, CA


Contributed Paper Session

AMS Special Session on Mathematics and Philosophy
Friday, January 5, 8 am - noon
Moscone Center, Room 056

We encourage anyone who has done some recent work related to the philosophy of mathematics to propose a talk for our session. These should be non-technical talks, aimed at a general mathematical audience (for technical work in foundations, there are ASL sessions, for example) but all topics in the philosophy of mathematics (including philosophical aspects of foundations) are welcome.

TimePresenterTitle
8:00 a.m.Donald G Palmer Bridging the Boundary of Applied and Pure Mathematics: A Philosophical Argument for Expanding Mathematics and Scientific Disciplines via a New Numeric System. Slides(pptx).
8:30 a.m. Theodore V Theodosopoulos Some remarks on collective sense-making. Slides(pptx).
9:00 a.m. Thomas L Drucker Lewis Carroll and Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll: P.E.B. Jourdain on the State of Mathematical Philosophy in 1918
9:30 a.m. Jared M. Ifland Metaontology in Light of the Frege-Hilbert Controversy. Slides(pdf).
10:00 a.m. Martin E Flashman Do We Need a Separate Philosophy of Geometry? Slides(pptx).
10:30 a.m. Chanwoo Lee Category Theory as an Explanatory Foundation. Slides(pdf).
11:00 a.m. Owen Biesel Sheaves of Probability. Slides(pdf).

Session organizers:


Guest Lecture and Discussion

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics: Dissolving Wigner's Applicability Problem
Arezoo Islami, San Francisco State University
Friday, January 5, 2024, 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Moscone Center, Room 303

In a 1980 Monthly article, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics", Richard Hamming discussed what he took to be Wigner's problem (from 1960) of "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" and offered some partial explanations. My goal is to show that Hamming's reading misses Wigner's highly original formulation of the problem. Rereading Wigner's work more closely, we are led in new directions in addressing and solving the applicability problem.



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