Activity and Sign

The advancement of a scientific discipline depends not only on the "big heroes" of a discipline, but also on a community s ability to reflect on what has been done in the past and what should be done in the future. This volume combines perspectives on both. It celebrates the merits of Michael Otte as one of the most important founding fathers of mathematics education by bringing together all the new and fascinating perspectives created through his career as a bridge builder in the field of interdisciplinary research and cooperation. The perspectives elaborated here are for the greatest part motivated by the impressing variety of Otte s thoughts; however, the idea is not to look back, but to find out where the research agenda might lead us in the future.§This volume provides new sources of knowledge based on Michael Otte s fundamental insight that understanding the problems of mathematics education how to teach, how to learn, how to communicate, how to do, and how to represent mathematics depends on means, mainly philosophical and semiotic, that have to be created first of all, and to be reflected from the perspectives of a multitude of diverse disciplines.§