Charles Bland

Despite never taking a strong interest in mathematics at school, I fell in love with the discipline of mathematical logic after being exposed to it during a BA in Philosophy at Durham University. The rush I felt while reading and writing mathematical proofs convinced me that my affair with mathematics would not end with graduation. I spent three years after graduating from Durham in various pursuits - working as a software engineer, then in a secondary school, not to mention some volunteering - before I decided to return to academia. Starting in 2023, I studied Logic and Philosophy of Science at LMU Munich in Germany, before being awarded an OOC DTP studentship, which is jointly funded by the AHRC and Churchill College, Cambridge.

My research is in the philosophy of mathematics, which seeks to understand the nature of the subject and the practice of mathematicians better. Some of the questions I am interested in are: What do mathematicians mean when they say that a theorem is 'beautiful'? Should mathematics be counted as an art alongside painting, music, and film? Why are some mathematical proofs singled out as 'explanatory', when all (valid) proofs establish the truth of their results? What is the role of mathematics in explaining phenomena in the natural, non-mathematical world? In addition to the time-old philosophical technique of reflective thought, I hope to pursue these questions by talking to working mathematicians at Cambridge's world-class mathematics department.