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The paper investigates how visual resources can be fruitfully used to study the history of science, medicine, and technology from a practical point of view. Two new international and interdisciplinary trends within recent historiography are reviewed: the history of visualisation and the history of popularisation. The results of both trends need to be combined in order to understand the ways in which images of science have been used to communicate science from its place of production within the laboratory to its users within the wider society. From the proposed perspective, visual representations of science (i.e. portraits, images of scientific instruments, measurement results and abstractions) are discussed as a distinct medium in which knowledge producers have transmitted and transformed their findings to the acquirers of knowledge. The paper introduces the wider historiographical framework for a discussion of the following four papers published in this issue of NTM.

The necessity of a scientific teacher training — which is not only training in the subject matter or only training in teaching skills and curriculum elements but a combination of both completed by the development of a competence to reflect theory and practice — is explained first. The study of didactics of a subject is very fundamental for this. Therefore, the research fields of didactics of mathematics and the tasks of didactics within a scientific teacher training are the main points of the paper. To illustrate its ideas, a decription of themes treatet in several seminars on didactics of mathematics is presented in the last chapter. One aim of this paper is to stimulate the discussion in respect to improving teacher training.

In Anbetracht der steigenden Zahl von Wandernden wird transnationale Migration als ein Fall von Globalisierung interpretiert. Zugleich fallt auf, dass der Anteil von Migranten an der Weltbevolkerung im letzten halben Jahrhundert kaum gewachsen ist. Allerdings ubersehen beide Perspektiven das soziologisch zentrale Ratsel der relativen Immobilitat: Warum gibt es so wenige transnationale Migranten aus den meisten Orten in den sogenannten Entwicklungs-und Transformationslandern? Warum gibt es wiederum so viele Migranten aus einigen wenigen Orten des Sudens bzw. Ostens in den Norden bzw. Westen? Eine systematische Analyse der Faktoren fur Immobilitat und Mobilitat ergibt, dass wichtige Ressourcen in der Regel lokal gebunden sind (local assets). Allerdings kann transnationale Migration angesichts der zunehmenden Mobilitat von professionalisierten Fachkraften oder der zunehmenden Dichte von Informationsflussen und Transportmoglichkeiten durchaus als ein Beispiel fur lebensweltlich gepragte Transnationalisierung begriffen werden, in dem primar lokal gebundene Ressourcen von Migranten uber Staatsgrenzen hinweg mobilisiert werden.

In his paper „Machines and the Mental“ Fred Dretske claims that there is a difference on principle between men on the one and animals and machines on the other side which arises from the fact that men are able to respond to the meaning of symbols whereas animals and machines can only respond to the symbols that have the meaning. In this paper it is argued that this claim does not bear closer scrutiny. Mainly for two reasons: 1. The mere having of a certain meaning does not rank among the possible causal properties of a symbol, not even in the case of men; for it is not the having of the meaning that may have certain effects on the behavior of a person, but the fact that the personassociates this meaning with the symbol. 2. Even animals are capable to associate a meaning with a symbol, i. e. even animals can learn to come to believe thatp if they become aware of a symbol which has the meaning thatp.

This is a continuation of the paper “Zwei Klassen lokalkompakter maximal fastperiodischer Gruppen”, [6]. In [6], the classes $$\mathfrak{A}$$ and $$\mathfrak{D}$$ were introduced. We give sufficient conditions to conclude thatG is in $$\mathfrak{D}(\mathfrak{A} \cap \mathfrak{D})$$ if one knows thatG/G 0 is in $$\mathfrak{D}(\mathfrak{A} \cap \mathfrak{D})$$ . If a groupG is in $$\mathfrak{A} \cap \mathfrak{D}$$ and ifG satisfies the Chu-duality then all closed subgroups ofG satisfy the Chu-duality. The Chu-quasi-dual of the Heisenberg groupH with integral coefficients is computed. It is shown thatH does not satisfy the Chu-duality, thatH is in $$\mathfrak{A}$$ , and thatH is not in $$\mathfrak{D}$$ .