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We present a replication study of one of the most renowned seminal works in the field of mathematics education, i.e., the Fischbein et al. (1985) study on implicit models of multiplication and division in solving word problems. The original instrument was administered to a sample of 902 grade 7 students, proposing some methodological variations. The discussion focuses on four items involving partitive division of integer numbers, and results are compared to the original study: the main results of the original study are confirmed, but we contribute further with considerations on the statistical significance of differences observed in item difficulty. Finally, through our new methodological approach, we broaden the results of the original study by analysing students’ behaviour on the basis of their general arithmetical problem-solving ability. Students with medium-level ability are more influenced by the primitive model than those with lower ability.

In this contribution, we discuss phenomenological research related to a pilot study carried out by the Consortium of the MaTeK Horizon 2020 project during the 2020–21 academic year. The research aims to analyse the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of teaching resources in mathematics in five coun- tries. A questionnaire made of seven questions was administered to a data sample made of teachers of all grades. The answers coming from the questionnaire were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. Closed-ended questions were analysed by using a clustering methodology called k-means. Open-ended questions were qualitatively analysed. The results show that almost all the teachers are aware of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education. However, their perception of how the pandemic situation changed the use of educational resources mostly appears linked to cultural factors, age, teaching experiences and school grades of the teachers.

In this work the situation of the “Circolo Matematico di Palermo” between 1914 and 1928 is analyzed. It will be observed that during this time the Circolo was among the few European scientific associations with German as well as French associates. During the 1930s, the nationalist politics of Fascism and above all the racial laws dealt a deadly blow to the Circolo as an international scientific association. We will use the rich correspondence in the Circolo's archives to shed some light on this. In particular, the correspondence between M. De Franchis and E. Landau and other recently found documents will figure prominently.

What could the Venice of the future look like? A project for an ideal city can take off from an allegory: arts and sciences inside a seed of Lodoicea maldivica, whose bipartition reminds us of a human brain. From the seeds left by the past, we derive the vision of the future. The ideal city certainly needs brains able to conceptualize images and develop ideas, and bridges to strengthen connections and in- teractions. A well-working brain needs “bridges” as connections between ideas and techniques. My vision for a future city contains a livable and stimulating space enhancing at one time creativity, enthusiasm, and scientific development. To this aim, I use the image and the metaphor of cerebral hemispheres, specialized in activities of different typologies yet interconnected. The image of the brain is one of the symbols of cognition. The right hemisphere deals with artistic expression, while the left hemisphere refers to logic thinking, mathematics, scientific attitude toward the world. Different cerebral areas, which contribute to the complex and rich life of an individual, are a metaphor for different places in a city, contributing to the completeness of a community life. Separation between hemispheres, also as a homage to Venice, is seen as a sort of Canal Grande, and connections are represented by bridges. The whole brain is seen as a giant seed of Lodoicea maldivica: the city of the future needs to develop from seeds, that is, knowledge inherited from the past and new ideas from our minds and thoughts. Thoughts that, in turn, are fed upon the Science of Complexity.

National and International standardized assessments have shown sharp differences between native and foreign students’ performance in both text comprehension and mathematics. Based on the data gathe...

The difficulties encountered during the COVID19 emergency have led to reflection on teaching methods and the introduction of new digital tools. In this paper we highlight how the use of a digital platform can support mathematical discussion, playing a fundamental role in the construction of meaning of new mathematical objects during laboratory activities. We qualitatively analyse the results of a teaching experiment involving a discussion based on comparison of different solutions to the same problem, which is recognised as a powerful pedagogical activity but also a challenge for both teachers and learners.

In this paper, we examine the evolution of a specific mathematical problem, i.e. the nine-point conic, a generalisation of the nine-point circle due to Steiner. We will follow this evolution from Steiner to the Neapolitan school (Trudi and Battaglini) and finally to the contribution of Beltrami that closed this journey, at least from a mathematical point of view (scholars of elementary geometry, in fact, will continue to resume the problem from the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century). We believe that such evolution may indicate the steady development of the mathematical methods from Euclidean metric to projective, and finally, with Beltrami, with the use of quadratic transformations. In this sense, the work of Beltrami appears similar to the recent (after the anticipations of Magnus and Steiner) results of Schiaparelli and Cremona. Moreover, Beltrami's methods are closely related to the study of birational transformations, which in the same period were becoming one of the main topics of algebraic geometry. Finally, our work emphasises the role played by the nine-point conic problem in the studies of young Beltrami who, under Cremona's guidance, was then developing his mathematical skills. To this end, we make considerable use of the unedited correspondence Beltrami – Cremona, preserved in the Istituto Mazziniano, Genoa.

The paper presents some reflections and activities developed by researchers and teachers involved in teacher education programs on cultural transposition. The construct of cultural transposition is presented as a condition for decentralizing the didactic practice of a specific cultural context through contact with other didactic practices of different cultural contexts. We discuss the background theoretical issues of this approach and also give an analysis of two examples of cultural transposition experiences carried out in Italy. In particular, by means of qualitative analysis of some excerpts, discussions, and interviews, we show that the contact with different perspectives coming from China and Russia fostered educational practices and reflections on whole number arithmetic education.

Musical gestures connect the symbolic layer of the score to the physical layer of sound. I focus here on the mathematical theory of musical gestures, and I propose its generalization to include braids and knots. In this way, it is possible to extend the formalism to cover more case studies, especially regarding conducting gestures. Moreover, recent developments involving comparisons and similarities between gestures of orchestral musicians can be contextualized in the frame of braided monoidal categories. Because knots and braids can be applied to both music and biology (they apply to knotted proteins, for example), I end the article with a new musical rendition of DNA., Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures

Mathematics can help analyze the arts and inspire new artwork. Mathematics can also help make transformations from one artistic medium to another, considering exceptions and choices, as well as artists' individual and unique contributions. We propose a method based on diagrammatic thinking and quantum formalism. We exploit decompositions of complex forms into a set of simple shapes, discretization of complex images, and Dirac notation, imagining a world of "prototypes" that can be connected to obtain a fine or coarse-graining approximation of a given visual image. Visual prototypes are exchanged with auditory ones, and the information (position, size) characterizing visual prototypes is connected with the information (onset, duration, loudness, pitch range) characterizing auditory prototypes. The topic is contextualized within a philosophical debate (discreteness and comparison of apparently unrelated objects), it develops through mathematical formalism, and it leads to programming, to spark interdisciplinary thinking and ignite creativity within STEAM., Comment: Accepted for publication, Journal of Mathematics and Music. New references added in this version

In computer science, the notion of service is a broad term that incorporates any IT service delivered and accessible globally from the Internet. With the arrival of social networks and the pervasive entry of IT into business infrastructures, the population of (web-based) Internet service has grown large enough to turn the need, acquisition, delivery, maintenance and upgrade of computing resources into real strategic challenges. Along with the technology evolution and the growth experienced on the available information, the resource demand has been increasing in both science and engineering marketplaces. To satisfying the growth in resource demand, there have been attempting to enhance the resource-efficiency of delivered service to users, i.e., the effective utility from the available resources, before investing in additional compute resources, in an attempt to maximize their business competitiveness and return on investment of their infrastructures. Accordingly, one of the significant features that make cloud computing an attractive service-oriented architecture for competitive business is: elasticity, i.e., the ability to scale up/down the resources on-demand together with pay-per-use pricing model which eliminates the need for massive up- fronts investment in local infrastructure, a model that was not economically feasible in the era of traditional enterprise infrastructures.Therefore, the work in this thesis had the focus on improving performance and resource utilization of service in Cloud environment.

This study is aimed at exploring how different formulations of the same mathematical item may influence students’ answers, and whether or not boys and girls are equally affected by differences in presentation. An experimental design was employed: the same stem-items (i.e., items with the same mathematical content and question intent) were formulated differently and administered to a probability sample of 1647 students (grade 8). All the achievement tests were anchored via a set of common items. Students’ answers, equated and then analysed using the Rasch model, confirmed that different formulations affect students’ performances and thus the psychometric functionality of items, with discernible differences according to gender. In particular, we explored students’ sensitivity to the effect of a typical misconception about multiplication with decimal numbers (often called “multiplication makes bigger”) and tested the hypothesis that girls are more prone than boys to be negatively affected by misconception.

Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional structures and strategies. Mathematics can also be applied to the entire making of music, from the score to the performance, connecting compositional structures to acoustical reality of sounds. Moreover, the precise concept of gesture has a decisive role in understanding musical performance. In this paper, we apply some concepts of category theory to compare gestures of orchestral musicians, and to investigate the relationship between orchestra and conductor, as well as between listeners and conductor/orchestra. To this aim, we will introduce the concept of gestural similarity. The mathematical tools used can be applied to gesture classification, and to interdisciplinary comparisons between music and visual arts., Comment: The final version of this paper has been published by the Journal of Mathematics and Music

The mathematical formalism of category theory allows to investigate musical structures at both low and high levels, performance practice (with musical gestures) and music analysis. Mathematical formalism can also be used to connect music with other disciplines such as visual arts. In our analysis, we extend former studies on category theory applied to musical gestures, including musical instruments and playing techniques. Some basic concepts of categories may help navigate within the complexity of several branches of contemporary music research, giving it a unitarian character. Such a 'unification dream,' that we can call 'cARTegory theory,' also includes metaphorical references to topos theory.

This paper examines an annotation in Newton’s hand found by H. W. Turnbull in David Gregory’s papers in the Library of the Royal Society (London). It will be shown that Gregory asked Newton to explain to him how the trajectories of a body accelerated by an inverse-cube force are determined in a corollary in the Principia: an important topic for gravitation theory, since tidal forces are inverse cube. This annotation opens a window on the more hidden mathematical methods which Newton deployed in his magnum opus. The received view according to which the Principia are written in a geometric style with no help from calculus techniques must be revised.

We describe the historical framework and the main issues (biographical, scientific, political, etc.) of the correspondences of Placido Tardy and Luigi Cremona in the libraries of Genoa, which constitute an important contribution to the reconstruction of the History of Mathematics in the Italian “Risorgimento”. In particular, we mainly deal with the Cremona-Tardy, Betti-Tardy and Cremona-Guccia correspondences. Tardy’s letters are preserved at the Genoa University Library and Cremona’s letters at the Mazzini Institute of Genoa.

This contribution examines the circumstances of composition of the annotated edition of Newton's Principia that was printed in Geneva in 1739-1742, which ran to several editions and was still in print in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. This edition was the work of the Genevan Professor of Mathematics, Jean Louis Calandrini, and of two Minim friars based in Rome, Thomas Le Seur and François Jacquier. The study of the context in which this edition was conceived sheds light on the early reception of Newtonianism in Geneva and Rome. By taking into consideration the careers of Calandrini, Le Seur and Jacquier, as authors, lecturers and leading characters of Genevan and Roman cultural life, I will show that their involvement in the enterprise of annotating Newton's Principia answered specific needs of Genevan and Roman culture. The publication and reception of the Genevan annotated edition has also a broader European dimension. Both Calandrini and Jacquier were in touch with the French république des lettres, most notably with Clairaut and Du Châtelet, and with the Bernoulli family in Basel. Therefore, this study is also relevant for the understanding of the dissemination of Newton's ideas in Europe.

Brigaglia Aldo, Gaino Bruna, Radelet-de-Grave Patricia. Saccheri vu par Corrado Segre en Italie et par Mansion et Bosmans en Belgique. In: Bulletin de la Classe des sciences, tome 21, 2010. Le Père Henri Bosmans SJ (1852-1928) historien des mathématiques. pp. 83-104.

In this essay I analyze the solutions given by Isaac Newton and Johann Bernoulli to a well-posed mathematical problem known in the eighteenth century as the ‘inverse problem of central forces’. This work prompted polemical exchanges between two rival groups: the first, whose leader was Newton, was based in Oxford, Cambridge, and London; the second, whose leading representatives were Leibniz and Bernoulli, was scattered througout Europe, though centered in Basel and Paris.

Let (V, H) be an anisotropic Hermitian space of finite dimension over the algebraic closure of a real closed field K. We determine the orbits of the group of isometries of (V, H) in the set of K-subspaces of V . Throughout the paper K denotes a real closed field and K its algebraic closure. Then it is well known (see, for example, [4, Chapter 2], [23]; see also [8]) that K = K(i) with i = √−1. Also we let (V,H) be an anisotropic Hermitian space (with respect to the involution underlying the quadratic field extension K/K) of finite dimension n over K. In this context we consider the natural action of the unitary group U = U(V,H) of isometries of (V,H) on the set Xd of all ddimensional K-subspaces of V . The analogous problem where (V,H) is a symplectic space was treated in [1] (for arbitrary quadratic field extensions). It turns out that, in contrast with the symplectic case, there are infinitely many orbits for the action of the unitary group U on Xd. In group theoretic language the stated problem turns into the determination of the double coset spaces of the form (1) GW \G/U, where G = GL (VK) and GW denotes the parabolic subgroup of G stabilizing a member W ∈ Xd (we write VK to indicate that we are regarding V as a vector space over K). The precise structure of double coset spaces involving classical groups is of great interest in applying the classical Rankin-Selberg method for explicit construction of automorphic L-functions, as Garrett [2] and Piatetski-Shapiro and Rallis [6] worked out. 2000 AMS Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 51N30, 15A21, Secondary 11E39. Received by the editors on October 13, 2003. Copyright c ©2006 Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium

This paper focusing on the complex situation of the Italian multiculturalism and trying to reply to why Asian children mathematically outperform students from other countries, discusses from the epistemological point of view, Chinese children’s skills before to start their formal education in Italian educational school context. A review of the literature, comparing pre-schoolers competences of Asian and Western students, reveals two important influenced factors: linguistic and parental stimuli. In particular many researchers showed that the structure of the Chinese language provides in children a head start in basic math skills, for example to discover, since preschool activities, a pre-algebraic structures of writing. An example with numbers is shown in the paper. Other studies also show that Asian parents, compared to the Western cultures ones, tend to promote in a strong way the development of good basic mathematics skills and a stronger epistemological discipline foundation. A general framework on these two important aspects for the education context is presented with the aim to help teacher and researchers to better understand Chinese and Italian possible different cognitive styles in mathematics learning just from Preschool.

Starting from the concept that knowledge comes as element of mediation between the convergent thinking, founded on experience, and the divergent thinking, placed in the perceptive, intuitive, creative dimension, in this paper we want to present an idea for developing an educational path combining the concept of “beauty” and some historical notes. It is possible to use this dissertation as a starting point to conceive a geometric laboratory that drawing inspiration from artistic works, get to create geometric shapes provided with fascinating symmetries