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Mathematicians frequently attend their peers' lectures to learn new mathematical content. The goal of this paper is to investigate what mathematicians learned from the lectures. Our research took place at a 2-week workshop on inner model theory, a topic of set theory, which was largely comprised of a series of lectures. We asked the six workshop organizers and seven conference attendees what could be learned from the lectures in the workshop, and from mathematics lectures in general. A key finding was that participants felt the motivation and road maps that were provided by the lecturers could facilitate the attendees' future individual studying of the material. We conclude by discussing how our findings inform the development of theory on how individuals can learn from lectures and suggest interesting directions for future research.

In mathematics education research, proofs are often conceptualized as sequences of mathematical assertions. We argue that this ignores proofs that contain instructions to perform mathematical actions, often in the form of imperatives, which are common both in mathematical practice and in undergraduate mathematics textbooks. We consider in detail a specific type of proof which we call a recipe proof, which is comprised of sequence of instructions that direct the reader to produce mathematical objects with desirable properties. We present a model of what it means to understand a recipe proof and use this model in conjunction with process-object theories from mathematics education research, to explain why recipe proofs are inherently difficult for students to understand.

In this commentary, we explore tensions between engaging students in authentic disciplinary mathematical activity and insights from critical theorists who analyze equity in mathematics education. The tensions arise as engaging students in authentic mathematical activity usually involve having students adopt the language and norms of another community. We suggest these tensions can be mitigated (but not eliminated) by (i) focusing on expanding students' authentic mathematical practices while giving less concern towards eliminating inauthentic mathematical practices, (ii) not restricting authentic mathematical activity to the creation of new mathematics, and (iii) including activities that allow students to make mathematics personal.

Many mathematics educators believe a goal of instruction is for students to obtain conviction and certainty in mathematical statements using the same types of evidence that mathematicians do. However, few empirical studies have examined how mathematicians use proofs to obtain conviction and certainty. We report on a study in which 16 advanced mathematics doctoral students were given a task-based interview in which they were presented with various sources of evidence in support of a specific mathematical claim and were asked how convinced they were that the claim was true after reviewing this evidence. In particular, we explore why our participants retained doubts about our claim after reading its proof and how they used empirical evidence to reduce those doubts.

Undergraduate mathematics education can be experienced in discouraging and marginalizing ways among Black students, Latin* students, and white women. Precalculus and calculus courses, in particular, operate as gatekeepers that contribute to racialized and gendered attrition in persistence with mathematics coursework and pursuits in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). However, student perceptions of instruction in these introductory mathematics courses have yet to be systematically examined as a contributor to such attrition. This paper presents findings from a study of 20 historically marginalized students' perceptions of precalculus and calculus instruction to document features that they found discouraging and marginalizing. Our analysis revealed how students across different race-gender identities reported stereotyping as well as issues of representation in introductory mathematics classrooms and STEM fields as shaping their perceptions of instruction. These perceptions pointed to the operation of three racialized and gendered mechanisms in instruction: (i) creating differential opportunities for participation and support, (ii) limiting support from same-race, same-gender peers to manage negativity in instruction, and (iii) activating exclusionary ideas about who belongs in STEM fields. We draw on our findings to raise implications for research and practice in undergraduate mathematics education.

Mathematics education researchers frequently use task-based interviews to gain insight into mathematicians' practice. However, there are a number of factors that should prevent mathematics educators from extrapolating how individual mathematicians respond to researcher-generated tasks in laboratory conditions, to how mathematicians practice their craft in authentic settings. In this paper we critically analyze the rationality of using task-based interviews to investigate mathematical practice, focusing on how task-based interview studies have been used to inform our understanding of mathematicians' use of examples in mathematical practice. We discuss four specific generalizations about mathematical practice drawn from these studies, and suggest other types of studies that can be used to corroborate or challenge those generalizations.

This paper introduces two central questions (1) what are available methodologies for making claims about mathematical practice and (2) when and how do claims about mathematical practice influence mathematics instruction. To motivate these questions, we critically analyze the relationship between research into mathematicians' practice and the design of mathematics instruction in three ways. First, we describe three influential research programs in mathematics education and illustrate how each research program uses claims about mathematical practice to inform their instructional goals. Second, by examining these important works, we highlight intrinsic difficulties in investigating mathematical practice. Our conclusion is that every research methodology for investigating mathematical practice is fundamentally limited and we require triangulation from multiple methods and theoretical lenses to fully understand mathematical practice. Third, we highlight reasons for why mathematical practice sometimes should not inform mathematics instruction. We conclude this paper by discussing how the articles in this special issue address our two central questions.

The metaphors that students form and encounter have been shown to exert a powerful influence on how they think about mathematics. In this paper, we explore the linguistic metaphors about learning and doing mathematics that were prevalent in 11 advanced mathematics lectures. We present four metaphor clusters that were common in the corpus that we analyzed: Learning Mathematics is a Journey, Doing Mathematics is Work, Mathematics is Discovery, and Presenting Mathematics is a Story. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the metaphors that mathematicians use and students hear in their mathematics courses.

Most prospective secondary mathematics teachers in the United States complete a course in real analysis, yet view the content as unrelated to their future teaching. We leveraged a theoretically-motivated instructional model to design modules for a real analysis course that could inform secondary teachers' actionable content knowledge and pedagogy. The theoretical model and designed curriculum launches the study of advanced mathematics content, in this case, real analysis, via authentic 7-12 classroom situations, abstracts the secondary mathematics, and uses that content to motivate the presentation of the advanced mathematics content. Subsequently, the curriculum then reconnects to practice, asking the teachers to translate ideas from real analysis in ways that are appropriate for teaching high school content to students. This study evaluated the success of the curriculum in terms of the students' proficiency with real analysis, challenging secondary mathematics content, and the use of that content in teaching situations via both written post-tests and interviews and showed the viability of the model and experimental curriculum.

There is a longstanding conversation in the mathematics education literature about proofs that explain versus proofs that only convince. In this essay, we offer a characterization of explanatory proofs with three goals in mind. We first propose a theory of explanatory proofs for mathematics education in terms of representation systems. Then, we illustrate these ideas in terms of combinatorial proofs, focusing on binomial identities. Finally, we leverage our theory to explain audience-dependent and audience-invariant aspects of explanatory proof. Throughout, we use the context of combinatorics to emphasize points and to offer examples of proofs that can be explanatory or only convincing, depending on how one understands the claim being made.

To design and improve instruction in mathematical proof, mathematics educators require an adequate definition of proof that is faithful to mathematical practice and relevant to pedagogical situations. In both mathematics education and the philosophy of mathematics, mathematical proof is typically defined as a type of justification that satisfies a collection of necessary and sufficient conditions. We argue that defining the proof category in this way renders the definition incapable of accurately capturing how category membership is determined. We propose an alternative account--proof as a cluster category--and demonstrate its potential for addressing many of the intractable challenges inherent in previous accounts. We will also show that adopting the cluster account has utility for how proof is researched and taught.

We report on a study in which we observed 73 mathematics majors completing 7 proof construction tasks in calculus. We use these data to explore the frequency and effectiveness with which mathematics majors use diagrams when constructing proofs. The key findings from this study are (a) nearly all participants introduced diagrams on multiple tasks, (b) few participants displayed either a strong propensity or a strong reluctance to use diagrams, and (c) little correlation existed between participants' propensity to use diagrams and their mathematical achievement (either on the proof construction tasks or in their advanced mathematics courses). At the end of the report, we discuss implications for pedagogy and future research.

Most prospective secondary mathematics teachers complete a course in real analysis, yet view the content as unrelated to their future teaching. We leveraged a theoretically motivated instructional model to design modules for a real analysis course that could inform secondary teachers' pedagogy, focusing on how this model was implemented in a single module about "attending to scope." The central aim is to document how teachers' experience in this real analysis course influenced their subsequent teaching. In the majority of lessons we observed from six participating teachers, the following occurred: (i) the teacher explicitly attended to the scope of statements discussed in class; and (ii) in post-class interviews, the teacher highlighted their deliberate attention to scope and attributed this behavior to their experience in the experimental real analysis course. We discuss the design approach, its relation to teachers' actions in the classroom, and potential implications for teacher education in advanced content courses.

We report the results of a study in which we asked 94 mathematicians to evaluate whether five arguments qualified as proofs. We found that mathematicians disagreed as to whether a visual argument and a computer-assisted argument qualified as proofs, but they viewed these proofs as atypical. The mathematicians were also aware that many other mathematicians might not share their judgment and viewed their own judgment as contextual. For typical proofs using standard inferential methods, there was a strong consensus amongst the mathematicians that these proofs were valid. An instructional consequence is that for the standard inferential methods covered in introductory proof courses, we should have the instructional goal that students appreciate why these inferential methods are valid. However, for controversial inferential methods such as visual inferences, students should understand why mathematicians have not reached a consensus on their validity.

Prospective secondary mathematics teachers are usually required to complete several university advanced mathematics courses before being certified to teach secondary mathematics. However, teachers usually do not find these courses to be valuable for their teaching. We designed an experimental real analysis course with the goal of making real analysis content useful and relevant to teaching. Our approach was to ground the real analysis content in pedagogical situations that problematized a secondary mathematics topic, where the nuances of teaching secondary mathematics could be informed by the real analysis that was covered. The experimental course was implemented in a graduate teacher education programme with 32 pre- and in-service teachers (PISTs). After the course, we conducted focus group interviews with 20 of these PISTs to get feedback on how the course was valuable to their teaching practice. Many PISTs found the course to be valuable for teaching secondary mathematics, as well as for their understanding of secondary mathematics and real analysis.