Abstract
This workshop was dedicated to a discussion of epistemological and didactic aspects of mathematical structuralism with a focus on Abstract Algebra, in particular Group Theory. The participants worked on a corpus of documents comprising excerpts of the Bourbaki Manifesto “the architecture of mathematics” and the transcript of a discussion thread from a mathematical forum online. To what extent does mathematical structuralism rely on didactic principles? How is this reflected in a teaching-learning environment? The key construct within the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic was the theoretical notion of “structuralist praxeology”, introduced by the author. The analyses of the corpus led to the discussion of the rationale of such praxeologies, their historical development, how they may be reconstructed by learners, and the role played by the “dialectic of objects and structures” that should be added to Chevallard’s model for study and research processes in order to account for the development of structuralist praxeologies.