DH4PMP: Digital Humanities for Philosophy of Mathematical Practice

Project

This project aims to research and develop ways for machine learning and big data digital humanities to assist in posing and answering philosophically interesting questions about mathematical research practice.

The project is led by professor Henrik Kragh Sørensen, Section for History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. It includes collaborations with colleagues and students at DSE as well as international partners.

Visiting post-doc at DH4PMP

Since January 1, PhD Deniz Sarikaya has been visiting the DH4PMP group and the Section for History and Philosophy of Science at DSE on a German DAAD post-doc grant. Deniz will be working with Henrik and Mikkel on using empirical methods for philosophy of mathematics and conducting interviews and observations with mathematicians at DTU. The title of his project is "Theoretical virtues of conjectures and open questions in mathematical practice".

Deniz did his PhD on Philosophy of Mathematical Practice at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he is currently a postdoctoral researcher within the FWO-project "The Epistemology of Big Data: Mathematics and the Critical Research Agenda on Data Practices". Before that he studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Hamburg. He is interested in the interplay of the Sciences and Society, Artificial Intelligence (AI Safety, Machine Learning and its bounds, ethical questions, ...), likes to think about Mathematics from a linguistic perspective, works in Mathematics Education (esp. by promoting mathematically gifted youth), and likes doing mathematics when there is time left (esp. to think about extremal (infinite) combinatorics).

Invitation for student projects

If you are a student (BSc or MSc) at UCPH SCIENCE interested in machine learning, philosophy of mathematics and science, or other aspects of our project, we encourage you to consider writing a project with us. Feel free to contact us for a meeting.

Subprojects

We are actively pursuing subprojects on:

Theoretical and methodological aspects of using digital humanities to do philosophy of mathematical practice,
Detection and classification of diagrams,
Text- and structure mining mathematical papers.
Network analysis of mathematical concepts

Group

We encourage friendly collaboration with colleagues, partners from abroad, and students.

Henrik Kragh Sørensen, PI, professor, DSE
Mikkel Willum Johansen, associate professor, DSE
Oliver Aagaard Madsen, BSc student, DIKU/DSE
Anton Kristian Suhr, MSc, research assistant, DSE
Mikkel Tvorup Moseholm, MA, DSE
Sophie Kjeldbjerg Mathiasen, MSc
Laura Søvsø Thomasen, PhD, Royal Danish Library

Collaborators

We collaborate on international, interdisciplinary projects.

Hester Breman (Maastricht) and Renee Hoekzema (Oxford) on visual thinking in mathematics
Vincent Coumans (Nijmegen) on definitions in mathematics
Deniz Sarikaya (Brussels) on problem-posing in mathematics
Michael Barany (Edinburgh)

If you are interested in collaboration, see our Contributor- and Authorship guidelines and Contact Us.

Data sources

We can integrate data from a large number of sources:

Metadata, pdf-files and LaTeX sources from arXiv
Text from research publications
Threads from lists on StackExchange
Threads in mailing lists
Reviews from Zentralblatt Mathematik (zbMath) and Mathematical Reviews (MathSciNet)
Public Twitter feeds
Publication networds from CrossRef and Clarivate Web Of Science

Pipelines

We work with a number of corpora with associated pipelines:

A pipeline for detecting and measuring mathematical diagrams in pdf-files
A pipeline for extracting context-structured text from arXiv LaTeX sources
A pipeline for accessing metadata and reviews from ZbMath and MathSciNet
A pipeline for analysing 'threaded corpora' such as MathOverflow, mailing lists, etc.

Tools

We deploy a variety of big-data and ML-tools, including:

Object detection
POS-tagging and linguistic features
Dimension reduction (UMAP, PCA)
Topic modeling
Sentiment analysis

Software

Most of our code is written in python, and we rely on a set of key libraries for LaTeX and XML parsing, NLP, neural networks, statistical analysis, documentation etc.

Upcoming events

Recent publications

Pence, Charles, and Henrik Kragh Sørensen. 2022. “Extending Ourselves? On the Concept and Future of Digital Humanities.” SPSP Newsletter 17 (June). https://sway.office.com/9BAOrK8koNZYYsKe.

Johansen, Mikkel Willum, and Josefine Lomholt Pallavicini. 2022. “Entering the Valley of Formalism: Trends and Changes in Mathematicians’ Publication Practice — 1885 to 2015.” Synthese 200 (3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03741-8.