Towards the Design of a Didactic Engineering Relying on Economy as a Semiotic Model of Mathematics

Abstract

Teaching mathematics, in a business and management school, led us to investigate the use of economy as a way to give alternative meaning to mathematical concepts, whether these concepts were already known to students - mostly from secondary school - or not. The intent behind this idea was to reverse the traditional connection between mathematics and economy. We tried to bridge the increasing gap between what students coming from secondary school are really capable of, irrespective of their grades, and what is expected from them in a business and management school. Instead of mathematics seen as a tool for economy, where mathematical theories are simply “applied” to economy, we developed an engineering where economy is used as a semiotic model of mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is not “applied” anymore to economy, it rather becomes consubstantial to economy, both disciplines acting on each other. This paper presents the structure of this engineering, the underlying hypothesis and the didactic motivations behind it.