Bargaining clouds, or mathematics as a metaphoric exploration of the unexpected

• Autor(a) principal: Araújo, Tanya
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Outros Autores: Louçã, Francisco
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/2351
• topic: Cientific Process; Mathematics; Metaforic Exploration

In the very first page of his highly regarded novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that, when arriving at Macondo and discovering so many unknown objects, Aurelio Buendia had to point out these things because no words were defined for them. This metaphor of the process of metaphorisation is an apt description of the scientific process itself, as science points out to what it ignores: denotation generates connotation. Even when science is defined as a self-contained logic, as mathematics once presumed to be, it dares into the territories of the unknown and of the unexpected; the more rigorous, the more daring it ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this metaphor is powerful enough to suggest new methods to interpret the emergence of new patterns. In the current example, a stochastic geometry and topological technique are used to describe the structural change in the stock market for the last years. This new method suggests evidence for a transition of regimes in these markets, measures its dynamics and metaphorically provides a graphic description of the ongoing process.