This essay examines how line graphs functioned as markers of status and authority in early 20th-century America, distinguishing intellectual elites from ordinary citizens. Despite education reformers' efforts to democratize functional thinking and graphical representation in the first decades of the century, line graphs retained their position as…

In this article, I argue that the common practice across many school mathematics curricula of using a variety of different representations of number may diminish the coherence of mathematics for students. Instead, I advocate prioritising a single representation of number (the number line) and applying this repeatedly across diverse content areas.…

Critical to constructing and interpreting graphs is an individual's understanding of the underlying coordinate systems, yet coordinate systems are often overlooked or taken-for-granted in both mathematics education research and curricula. In this paper, we foreground coordinate systems and present a distinction between two uses of coordinate…

Results in Mathematics Education, from different theoretical perspectives, highlight students' difficulties with graphs, both in interpreting given ones and in producing their own graphs. In this paper, we take an affective lens to understand both a student's relationship with mathematical graphs and a teacher's role when a task with a graph is…

In most epistemologies, practical actions and speech are the consequences of thought. In this study, I provide three case studies of highly educated scientists producing aspects of graphs only to erase these as soon as they have been drawn. The case studies are consistent with an alternative approach, already formulated by L. S. Vygotsky and M.…

Drawing from sources in gesture studies, cognitive science, the anthropology of religion and art/architecture history, this article explores cultural, bodily and cosmological resonances carried (unintentionally) by mathematical graphs on Cartesian coordinates. Concepts of asymmetric bodily spaces, grids, orthogonality, mapping and sacred spaces…