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Article: What is mathematics?(From Helen Prochazka's Scrapbook)
- Article from:
- Australian Mathematics Teacher
- Article date:
- September 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) was developed by the American Mathematical Society and Zentralblatt fur Mathematik in Germany. It is used to categorise items covered by the two reviewing databases, Mathematical Reviews (MR) and Zentralblatt Math (Zbl). The MSC is broken down into more than 5000 classifications.
From the MSC comes this definition of mathematics:
Any attempt to distinguish the parts of mathematics must begin
with a decision about what constitutes mathematics in the first
place! We try to keep the broad definition here, that mathematics
includes all the related areas which touch on quantitative,
geometric, and ...