The term representation refers both to process and to product-in other words, to the act of capturing a mathematical concept or relationship in some form and to the form itself. The child who wrote her age as shown in figure 3.8 used a representation. The graph of f(x)=x^3 is a representation. Moreover, the term applies to processes and products that are observable externally as well as to those that occur “internally,” in the minds of people doing mathematics. All these meanings of representation are important to consider in school mathematics.