An analysis of the use of graphs in people's daily life

Abstract

This research paper addresses the lack of connection between people's own knowledge and the use of mathematical functions and scholastic mathematics. Experts in the field acknowledge that this issue generates a phenomenon of opacity in people's daily lives and the use of mathematical knowledge. Put in other words, other mathematical social functions, apart from those utilized in school environments, are not considered. To highlight this phenomenon, empirical evidence is built from the analysis of cultural forms of knowledge concerning the use of graphs in a setting of movement. Such evidence is overshadowed by scholastic mathematics, due to that fact that the foresaid forms are immersed in non-conventional argumentations. A reference framework of the use of graphs that resignifies trajectory and curve then arises. In this framework, the search for permanence and invariants when things vary gives way to the very argumentation of one's own mathematical knowledge that is, however, obscured in scholastic mathematics.