UC Berkeley

What does the word "math" evoke? It is in many ways a fraught term eliciting negative reactions and unpleasant memories. In this dissertation, I explore the variety of ways we humans perceive this concept, starting with the internal (perceptions of ability), then the personal journey (perceptions of belonging), and finally the external (perceptions of conception). I employ a mixture of experiments and computational modeling in order to develop a more holistic understanding of how people perceive math and reinforce human studies with data collected from naturalistic settings - specifically, the internet, to explore word usage and how discussions of math seem to dier from mentions of other concepts.