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can someone explain why teaching Pythagorean theorem is racist. If we are talking about math and not “math history”, which mean i don’t care who was Euclid's h
by skyde 5y ago
can someone explain why teaching Pythagorean theorem is racist.
If we are talking about math and not “math history”, which mean i don’t care who was Euclid's how long ago he lived and what his race was.
But i am just teaching the formula and how to use it.
How is this white math or white privilege?
And how would you teach how to compute the length of the hypotenuse without being racist ?
- homonculus1 5y agoYou do not grok what is happening here. You are approaching the threat with a completely inadequate paradigm. I do not believe HN moderation would permit me to explain further.
- cbozeman 5y agoWell indulge us and attempt it.
- boppo1 5y agoTake the risk. Or make a throwaway.
- skyde 5y agoI never said it was a threat, but the woke people claim the formula are racist so i give them the benefit of the doubt and willing to have someone explain why and how i should teach them in a less racist way.
- tharne 5y ago> so i give them the benefit of the doubt and willing to have someone explain why and how i should teach them in a less racist way. I think you misunderstand their motives here. I don't think even the wokest of the woke believes in their heart that math is racist. It's about power for its own sake. By labeling this or that arbitrary thing as racist or colonialist or trans-phobic, these people force every conversation back to their topics, on their terms, and their turf. By doing this, they are A) Establishing themselves as the default moral authority, and B) Successfully pushing the idea that reality is nothing more than what they say it is.
- tharne 5y agoAs others have said, try us. Generally speaking if you're making a good faith argument and doing so civilly, this place is pretty tolerant of all sorts of views even if not everyone shares them.
- madengr 5y agoSupposedly it was stolen from Africa, at the time they were flying gliders off the pyramids.
- mr_toad 5y agoArabic sources say Euclid was born in Lebanon and lived in Alexandria. Amusingly these were Greek “colonies” both, but I don’t think that’s the colonisation that people care about these days. The formula for the length of a hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is attributed to Pythagoras, not that the identity of the discoverer changes the truth of the mathematical identity one iota. Itoa derives from the ancient Phoenician unit of measurement, which was “nobody cares, shut up already”.
- a_shovel 5y agoNobody described in either the article or the original source from the Telegraph seems to have made any of these claims. So I'm not sure why you're asking these questions here.
- danamit 5y agoYou are not the target audience for this. I would assume it would be helpful for kids to hear some familiar names when studying subjects here and there. I know you cannot relate AT ALL and I do not relate either (did not grow up in the West), but people who are POC get affected so much by such things, and I don't see it being the end of Western civilization of some of this things are adjusted. Most of crediting is just mythos not even real creating. Just like how randos are credited with inventing the web, browser, email, infinite scrolling, password... etc Elon Musk claiming (and the being believed) that he co-founded Tesla is example of such mythos.
- rastignack 5y agoI’m French. Pythagore is not even remotely French sounding. I never felt the urge to whine about it.
- danamit 5y agonice you are a badass!
- skyde 5y agoPythagore does not sound Chinese either and i never met a Chinese person concerned about it :-)
- danamit 5y agonice you are a badass!
- wahern 5y agoIt seems like the argument may come from C. K. Raju. See this 2017 article in the Journal of Black Studies, "Black Thoughts Matter: Decolonized Math, Academic Censorship, and the "Pythagorean" Proposition", https://www.jstor.org/stable/26174222 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26174222 It's readable with a free JSTOR account, which might be worth it if you really care to understand the scholarly arguments, such as they are. At the very least, nobody will be able to say that you don't understand this particular argument.