IN MEMORIAM FRANCESCO SPERANZA
Mathematics culture loses a great teacher and thinker, for on the 19th of December 1998 professor Francesco Speranza left us. He was born in Milano the 4th October 1932. In 1954 he graduated in Mathematics from Pavia University and he was assistant lecturer in Geometry at the University of Bologna from 1954 to 1967. In 1967, as full professor of Differential Geometry he taught at the University of Messina. In 1969 he moved to the University of Parma where, from 1974, he had the chair of "Matematiche Complementari". He was a member (until his death) of the scientific commission of the Italian Mathematics Union, of the Italian Commission for Mathematics teaching, and other important commissions. His extensive researches, motivated by a great curiosity and desire to investigate, goes from differential geometry to didactics, history and epistemology of mathematics to art in mathematics. In the eighties he found in Parma a Centre for Mathematics Education and a group of researchers and teachers for concerned with researches in didactics. He was persuaded of the need of providing an epistemological basis for didactics. Following Enriques, Gonseth and Lakatos he didn't erect barriers between philosophy of mathematics and experimental sciences. He considered himself to be a neo-empiricist, a non-absolutist, and a fallibilist. He claimed that this position parallels developments in the philosophy of science based on the great scientific revolutions of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and Popper's school. In the early 1990s he founded a National Group of Epistemology of Mathematics which organises conferences every year. His great variety of cultural and scientific interests led him to publish more than 200 paper.
The Group of Mathematical Education Research of Parma: Lucia Grugnetti, Carlo Marchini, Daniela Medici, Margherita Michelotti, Maria Gabriella Rinaldi, Paola Vighi.
THE EDGE
Recommended free Web Journal touching on matters intellectual and philosophical including philosophy of mathematics
http://www.edge.org/
CD EDITION OF THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF C. S. PEIRCE
This is one of the philosophical works in The Past Masters Series
produced by InteLex Corporation.
This was reviewed in POMEJ10.
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Peirce title in the Past Masters catelogue: http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm
Past Masters series titles is at: http://www.nlx.com/pstm/pstmtitl.htm