I am guest editor for a forthcoming special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society & Space on the relation between mathematics and space (planned publication 2009/2010). The aim of this special issue is to draw attention to the implicit and explicit relations between spatial thought and mathematics. A consideration of the importance that mathematics plays within spatial thought and practices brings to mind fields such as geometry, topology, cartographic practice and theory, quantitative techniques within the social sciences, architecture, etc. These connections occur both in relation to what we might call a mathematical engineering and production of space – e.g. computer generated spaces, architectural spaces, and cartographic representations – and in relation to the history of mathematics that has placed the problematic of space at its centre – e.g. geometry, projective geometry, algebraic geometry, topology, etc. My long-term aim is to gather some of the papers from this special issue in a book alongside original texts by for example Leonard Euler, Henri Poincaré, and Georg Cantor.
