Rafael Núñez

Rafael Núñez is a professor of cognitive sciences at UC San Diego. Born and raised in Chile, he completed his doctoral career in Switzerland, and conducted his post-doctoral work at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He investigates the development and evolution of everyday and technical cognition (such as mathematics)—especially conceptual systems, symbolization, and abstraction— and their biologically enculturated underpinnings. His multidisciplinary approach uses methods such as psycholinguistic experiments, co-speech gesture, brain imaging, and field research with isolated indigenous groups in the Andes, Papua New Guinea, and the Amazon basin. His 2001 best-selling book, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (co-authored with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff), presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the human bio-cultural nature of mathematics and its foundations. Rafael Núñez is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is one the four PIs of the recently awarded European Research Council Synergy Grant QUANTA, designed to investigate the bio-cultural evolution of quantification and numeral systems around the world. He has been recently elected life-time fellow of the Cognitive Science Society for his “impact on the Cognitive Science community, and [his] sustained record of excellence in research contributions." He is the only South American to have ever received this distinction.