IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-030-42653-8_22.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Antanas Mockus and the Civil Role of a Mathematician

In: Imagine Math 7

Author

Listed:
  • Carlo Tognato

    (Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions, and Policy (SCIP), Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University
    Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University)

Abstract

At a time at which liberal democracy appears under formidable pressures all across the west, practitioners across a variety of disciplinary fields may wonder what role they might play in defense of civil values. The literature has identified a number of ways mathematics and mathematicians may contribute on that front. After referring to it, I will zoom into the case of Antanas Mockus, former chancellor of the National University of Colombia and a mathematician, who in 1995 became mayor of Bogotá at a time of profound crisis in Colombian society and started out a most ambitious program of urban intervention geared to induce rapid behavioral and cultural change among his fellow-citizens. His contribution changed the course of history in his city and left a mark in the political and intellectual history of Colombia, which national and international analysts have duly noted on a variety of occasions. In this chapter I will look at how the competences that the literature has identified to be cultivated by a training in, and a practice of, mathematics may have supported his interventions into the civil life of his own community.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlo Tognato, 2020. "Antanas Mockus and the Civil Role of a Mathematician," Springer Books, in: Michele Emmer & Marco Abate (ed.), Imagine Math 7, pages 363-380, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-42653-8_22
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42653-8_22
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-42653-8_22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.