Rafael Núñez

Rafael Núñez, has been a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego for more than two decades and is now at ETH Zurich. He was born and raised in Chile, and after completing his doctoral career in Switzerland (Fribourg, Geneva, and Lausanne) he 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, historical analyses, gesture studies, brain imaging, and field research with isolated indigenous groups. His 2000 best-selling book, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (co-authored with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff), introduced a theoretical framework for understanding the human cognitive linguistic resources underlying mathematics and its foundations.

Rafael Núñez is, among others, on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, an active faculty member of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) at UCSD devoted to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, and fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

He is one of the four PIs of the recently awarded European Research Council Synergy Grant QUANTA, designed to investigate the bio-cultural evolution of Quantification. 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 scholar to have ever received this honor.