1 School of Computing , University of Dundee , Dundee , UK.
2 School of Arts and Communication , Florida Institute of Technology , Melbourne , FL , USA.
Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2019 Mar 11;377(2140):20180159. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2018.0159.
Analysis of online mathematics forums can help reveal how explanation is used by mathematicians; we contend that this use of explanation may help to provide an informal conceptualization of simplicity. We extracted six conjectures from recent philosophical work on the occurrence and characteristics of explanation in mathematics. We then tested these conjectures against a corpus derived from online mathematical discussions. To this end, we employed two techniques, one based on indicator terms, the other on a random sample of comments lacking such indicators. Our findings suggest that explanation is widespread in mathematical practice and that it occurs not only in proofs but also in other mathematical contexts. Our work also provides further evidence for the utility of empirical methods in addressing philosophical problems. This article is part of the theme issue 'The notion of 'simple proof' - Hilbert's 24th problem'.
分析在线数学论坛可以帮助揭示数学家如何使用解释；我们认为，这种解释的使用可能有助于对简单性进行非正式的概念化。我们从最近关于数学中解释的出现和特征的哲学工作中提取了六个猜想。然后，我们将这些猜想与从在线数学讨论中得出的语料库进行了对比。为此，我们采用了两种技术，一种基于指示词，另一种基于没有这些指示词的评论的随机样本。我们的研究结果表明，解释在数学实践中非常普遍，它不仅出现在证明中，而且出现在其他数学语境中。我们的工作还为实证方法在解决哲学问题中的效用提供了进一步的证据。本文是主题为“简单证明的概念-希尔伯特的第 24 个问题”的一部分。
