Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the pinnacles of human cognition is the creative insightof expert mathematics. While its concepts are abstract, theactual practice of mathematics is undeniably material andembodied. Mathematicians draw, sketch, write; having createdthese inscriptions, they interact with them. This iterated processof inscription is the engine of mathematical discovery. But howdoes this engine work? Here, using a new video corpus ofmathematical experts working on proofs, and deploying toolsfrom network and complexity science, we characterize thestructure and temporal dynamics of how mathematical expertscreate and interact with blackboard inscriptions. We findregularities in the structure of this activity (e.g., emergent‘communities’ of inscriptions) and its temporal dynamics (e.g.,‘bursty’ shifts in attention). By characterizing this activity, wegain a better understanding of the distributed ecosystem inwhich mathematical creativity occurs — including the ways thatmathematicians actively construct their own notational niches.