Mission

Alpine Mathematics is dedicated to advancing the accessibility and appreciation of mathematics and its history.

• Accessibility: What does it mean to be able to “access” mathematics and its history? It means being able to read mathematical proofs, understand them, and have a sense of how they emerged from the work of human beings.

• Appreciation: People who don’t paint or write songs still enjoy paintings and music. Even if you aren’t advancing mathematics, you should know that you can understand and enjoy the work of mathematicians.

Hidden Beauty

Mathematical proofs are a kind of hidden art form, and the joy of discovering order in mathematical patterns goes unknown to most. In a series of blog posts, we talk about why this is so, and whether there might be new ways of presenting mathematics that could help improve the situation.

As brilliantly enunciated by Paul Lockhart in A Mathematician’s Lament, we live in a society where math is still largely perceived to be a dry, barren subject, sort of like being forced to study black and white music notation without ever actually having heard music. It can be no wonder that people hate and fear it! Can’t we do better? Can’t more people enjoy the actual music behind the notes?

What we’re doing

We’re a small business and aiming to grow. Our main activity right now is operating an online instance of PISE (the Proofscape Integrated Study Enivronment), which we call PISE Online.

We have an open “hosting request” process, whereby anyone can request that their own Proofscape content repos be hosted in PISE Online.

Currently, we are hosting the content repos published by the Toeplitz Project.