Math is now racist.
At least that is what is being argued at the Australian National University, and they aim to do something about that. It’s time we drop the White cisgendered heteronormative numbers-focused math and get down to some witch-doctor driven engineering.
The Science dept at Australia’s most prestigious university, is now offering a course in “Indigenous Mathematics,” in an effort to “decolonise maths.”
“Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.”https://t.co/hw4DLFy0nt
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 16, 2024
All I can say is that I wouldn’t be enthused to fly an airplane not built with some European math; it’d be like flying a 737, or perhaps worse.
What constitutes mathematical knowledge? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to decide? These are some of the questions being asked in a growing decolonisation movement.
“Mathematics is a universal human phenomenon, and students of under-represented and minority groups and colonised peoples are starting to be more critical about accepting unquestioningly the cultural hegemony of mainstream European-based mathematics,” says Professor Rowena Ball from the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.
Professor Ball leads a research and teaching initiative called Mathematics Without Borders, aimed at broadening and diversifying the cultural base and content of mathematics.
“Mathematics has been gatekept by the West and defined to exclude entire cultures. Almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based,” she explains. “We would like to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics.”
“Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world are standing up and saying: ‘Our knowledge is just as good as anybody else’s − why can’t we teach it to our children in our schools, and in our own way?’
“And this is happening in New Zealand, North and South America, and Africa, and also in a great movement in India to revive traditional Indian mathematics.”
I want to get off Earth and move to a planet where people are sane. Just how insane will this “decolonizing” become?
The irony is that mathematics isn’t actually a European discipline. Not only is it true that math is by its nature universal, but it is also the case that the very numbers we use in practicing math are called “Arabic numerals” for a reason. Try building a rocket with Roman numerals and see how easy that is.
“There is a lot of gatekeeping going on,” Professor Ball says of having to justify Indigenous maths. “One effect of colonisation of the curriculum is defensive protection of what is thought to be an exclusively European and British provenance of mathematics.”
“Like most mathematicians I was educated in European and British mathematics,” says Professor Ball, “and it’s fine stuff – I still love my original research field in dynamical systems.” But that mathematics did not develop in isolation, she says, and now there’s even more to learn about how non-Western societies have been seeing the world mathematically that many of us haven’t yet tuned into.
“What the general public think of as mathematics tends to be whatever they learned (or, more likely, did not learn) at school. But in many Indigenous societies, mathematics is lived from when you are born to when you rejoin your ancestors,” Professor Ball says.
“It’s about formalised relationships within human society and with every element of the environment. Everyone is taught them. And the levels go up from birth to adulthood, as you are ready for more knowledge. This mathematics permeates every aspect of life.”
Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.
Numbers and arithmetic and accounting don’t matter so much, you say?
Well I have some news for you: writing was invented to do accounting first and foremost, and out of both of them civilization developed. In places where such things didn’t take place people rarely developed beyond the stone age.
Read some history. The cradle of civilization was all about accounting. It is one of the key ways that civilizations developed into agricultural societies. Some of the very first writing we have discovered have been accounting tablets. No joke, as Biden would say.
The world’s first writing —cuneiform —(fig. 1) traces its beginnings back to an ancient system of accounting. This method of accounting used small geometrically shaped clay tokens to keep track of goods such as livestock and grain produced in the early farming communities of the ancient Near East.
Without accounting writing itself would have taken much longer to develop.
This movement is so profoundly stupid that the people pushing it don’t seem to realize that it emphasizes how backward some societies actually were. There may be many things to admire in indigenous societies, but their grasp of mathematics is generally not one of them. And to the extent that they were mathematically literate, they corresponded well enough with so-called “European” mathematics.
These types of courses have nothing to do with the “math” or “science” they claim to be celebrating. They have everything to do with the growing anti-Westernism pervading our universities and educational institutions.
No doubt, the very same people who push this intellectual mush would turn around and complain if we denied Western medicine to an indigenous person who needed a kidney transplant, and with good reason. No herb or potion could match the efficacy of good ol’ colonialist medicine in such cases.
Plenty of wisdom may be buried in indigenous ways of life, but it isn’t in their math or science. As blind as Westerners may be to some of the rhythms of life or the wisdom of diets without processed foods, I doubt indigenous math could land a probe on Mars.
Indigenous societies often excel at non-numerical mathematics, she says.
“One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signalling technology in real time,” Professor Ball says. “If you light an incense stick you will see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate − these are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.”
A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station on Mithaka country in the early 1900s, vividly describes the signalling procedure, in which husband-and-wife expert team Bogie and Mary-Anne selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl, to signal “white men”, instead of the more usual right to left spiral.
Geez. To call that “math” is a stretch.
Remind me to check who did the calculations for building a bridge next time I am in Australia.