4 ms·

What the…? Do they imagine people in Africa, Latin America or Asia will give a rat’s arse about the ‘race of the mathematician’ they are citing? It’s math. I

by mc32 5y ago

What the…? Do they imagine people in Africa, Latin America or Asia will give a rat’s arse about the ‘race of the mathematician’ they are citing? It’s math. I don’t recall scrutinizing the ‘race’ of the mathematicians of antiquity or the renaissance or modern times when I was in school. These idiots want to inject ‘race’ into everything. This is utterly idiotic. What’s the point, to achieve paralysis? At the height of the Cold War, when the fate of civilization was in the balance, still we gave credit where credit was due -so long as translations existed to give people proper credit. But this? What happens when they get to philosophy --do they discard all of Western philosophy its derivatives and then construct something parallel but not quite copying it because, obviously it would have problematic underpinnings and unwanted ways of thinking and processing. Are Indo-European languages 'racist', do we invent grunts to communicate?

laxmin 5y ago
- 3a2d29 5y ago
  Not sure I agree exactly with the poster you are replying to, I am sure there is racism in regards to who gets credit for mathematical discovers. What I think more people find annoying is that this is another way rich people, sitting in their ivory towers, get to pretend to save the world from racism, without actually doing anything. It reminds me of America inventing the world Latinx and praising themselves as heros...while Latin America didn't care and didn't ever have an issue with previously used words.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Whole Latinx seems like trying to fix an issue that isn't even there. In a way that is more culturally insensitive than any level of sexism it tries to combat. The whole word doesn't in anyway work in language context... It is fundamentally imperialist culture, forcing English on others.
- laxmin 5y ago
  For e.g. the Pythagorean theorem - that was independently discovered by many cultures centuries or even millennia before the Greek mathematician. There is no need to refer it to his name, it could be the law of triangular squares or something (just an example, please do roast me for this) Also, the theorem is is mentioned in the Baudhayana Sulba-sutra of India in almost the same structure, word for word, written between 800 and 400 BCE. Today, it appears as if the Greeks are the fountainhead of all of western philosophy and world mathematics. In education, the western civilisation is studied as an inverted pyramid. A large base of goodness and greatness with some badness towards the sharp peak thrown in.. like how the US is a country founded on principles of freedom while the bad parts like slavery is seen as a small aberration. Contrast it with the treatment of India in the western press, education and academia. The base of India is the bad bad casteism, poverty, snake charmers, millions of gods, some sort of pagan religion, etc which gets all the focus while small goodnesses hardly gets any mention. Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek - from Advaita to Nagarjuna's Buddhist nihilism - ever heard of these? Blame your education. If you have heard, kudos, you are a statistical outlier. All this leads to the ingrained slant that we see on social media. India means rapists, poverty and what not. The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect. This is just an example. Thanks for reading. Disagree if you must, but let's enjoy the freedom of expression. [All hail the Internet. To the Human Brain and Evolution behind it, belongs all Glory.]
  - mc32 5y ago
    If people in Russian, or Spanish or Chinese or Indians want to call the Pythagorean theorem by any other name, let them, by all means, who cares? Let them print their own books, publish their own web pages and have them call it by whatever they want. In English we get it from our own tradition, they can get it from their own. If they like they can very well make it up, who cares. Is it racist if Indians or Chinese, or Egyptians have another names for it? Like who cares about where the nomenclature came from. They can call it frankfurter instead, or porkbun, who cares. In English we call it the Pythagorean theorem. We have our names, they have theirs. What next, people who speak English remove any bible-inspired names and take up native names because using biblical names is racist by denying names 'native' to English? I guess Peter is out but William is in, right? Wait, wait, to further decolonize the English language itself, we'll abandon the Latin alphabet and go back to Fuþark, better? Ah, decolonization!
- pyuser583 5y ago
  It would be helpful if you gave actual examples of how math is racist, instead of making accusations of “blind denialism.” Instead of telling us how blind we are, why don’t you enlighten us?
- danamit 5y ago
  I think the issue with crediting should be acknowledged but not tried to be "corrected". And by "acknowledged" I mean if you are an adult you should know crediting is not accurate, and it's kinda just culture. Even modern crediting is not accurate. I would compare it to Christopher Columbus "discovering" America. You should know what most say/think/assume, and what's reality (America was inhabited, bad deeds done, Amerigo was first to America?...).
- patrick451 5y ago
  > It was by accident that some mathematicians were recognised by the west (Srinivasa Ramanujan for example). Others have to get into western academia to be recognised. So what? This dynamic is no different than the unpopular, nerdy reject crying to teacher that the popular kids are excluding him. On both accounts, it's very strange that outsider so strongly desires to be recognized and included by the group that supposedly hates them. Create your own reality.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- h9n 5y ago
  If countering blind denialism means conducting mathematics with regard for anything other than mathematics, then blind denialism it must be. I think though this is falsely dichotomous, and hyperbolic, and that such assertions have only served to harm their respective political programs, not least of all by causing resistance to and embarrassment for them. Set anything against mathematics, and mathematics must win. The National Socialists rued dismissing general relativity as “Jewish Physics”, and the Marxist ideology was made to look ridiculous by the Soviet state’s support of Lysenkoism in opposition to “Bourgeois Biology”. When Stalin asked for a nuclear bomb, his scientists were explicitly denied the use of “Bourgeois Physics” (the very same theory the Nazis called “Jewish”). Ultimately, of course, the concession was made at the expense of the ideology. There is just physics, there is just biology, and there is no racist or colonial mathematics — there is just better or worse mathematics, the determination of which is mathematics itself.
- funcDropShadow 5y ago
  > There is racism in Mathematics, just as race has affected every other human endeavor. Would you mind to share examples of racism in math? I mean instances where people chose to cite or not cite someone because of their race? And how would that improve if we encourage scientist and mathematicians to favor race instead of applicability, relevance and scientific rigor as a criteria to select references? > To not acknowledge this is blind denialism. Perhaps you should make a stronger case for your hypothesis instead of blaming the reader.
- antisinguIarity 5y ago
  >Many of the original mathematical ideas that originated outside the west were simply discarded till somebody in the west came up with the same idea later (sometimes, centuries later) and are credited with the discovery. Could you name some? It's quite widely known that many ideas in mathematics are centuries (or millennia) old and came from other cultures and geographies. The very name of "algebra" refers to its Arabic roots, and was developed there during a golden era of sophistication and development many centuries ago. Is it a problem that ideas persist and move on, beyond their original geographical and cultural bounds? Personally, I don't think this is even the issue that the "de-colonise maths" crowd are trying to address. As I see it, this is the supposed root cause of the disparity in math grades between students of various ethnic groups, and the concept of "colonised maths" has been developed backwards from there.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- randomcarbloke 5y ago
  save it for the "History of Mathematics" course then, but frankly contributions are correctly attributed in any study of mathematics, if you want more influence from poc build a time machine. But while ancient Greeks may look closer to my appearance than say a subsaharan african, I am not Greek and my culture in no way resembles Greek or ancient Greek. Enjoy your absurd "reality".
jterrys 5y ago
We're in this weird point of attribution where the discoveries and popularizations of white men (in a society they created and dominated mind you) must now be discredited because similar theories existed in cultures and languages that are extinct, or we know little about, or are poorly documented. Convergent discoveries. In essence, 'white mathematics' is wrong because mathematical concepts existed in ambiguous points in times in undocumented or undiscovered regions of the world. We must now attribute these regions because...white men are bad ok? Nevermind that we can historically correlate these discoveries in a somewhat chronological timeline of innovation in our own western history. We can reverse engineer these discoveries and see that other cultures had similarly convergent ideas that sometimes predate discoveries in western history. It's important to give proper attribution where attribution is due, and I actually have no problem with this. It's cool to know that ancient India had such an advanced mathematical field of study for example. We frame these in a racist structure because... white civilization is bad? Is basically the gist I'm getting out of this. Which is why I think you and frankly most people reading that article are getting offended. Especially when you acknowledge mathematics as being a purely logical language used to express abstractions
zackees 5y ago
> What’s the point, to achieve paralysis? Yes. Here's a one hour lecture from a KGB defector who's explains what's going on: 15 min lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI 1 hour lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cWbq1PoSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cWbq1PoSw TL;DR: It's intentional, it's going to get way worse, and if you get too loud in opposition you will find yourself ostracized and possibly without a job.
inter_netuser 5y ago
2010-2020: a decade of Field's medalists: Elon Lindenstrauss Israel Ngô Bảo Châu Vietnam Stanislav Smirnov Russia Cédric Villani France Manjul Bhargava. United States Maryam Mirzakhani Iran Martin Hairer Austria Akshay Venkatesh Australia Notably, without exception, all of them were associated with IAS at some point. Seems biggest consideration here for DurhamU would be to consider making their own very successful IAS and curate that institute membership to whatever criteria and see how it competes globally. Looking forward to their contribution to Ma. more on DurhamU: I cannot even locate their Math ranking, but with #701 ranking in Engineering, and #310 in Physics, seems they've got plenty of work ahead of them to even come close to the IAS. (usnews rankings) an irrelevant un-ranked institution making noise?
inter_netuser 5y ago
>Director of Graduate Studies of History Erik Loomis that “Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist.” History department dictates Math dept policy in DurhamU? "#263 in Best Global Universities" #54 in Arts in Humanities. #310 in Physics. #701 in Engineering. is this what a great STEM school looks like? rankings: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/durham-university-501717#rankings https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/du...

by mc32 5y ago

laxmin 5y ago

3a2d29 5y ago
Not sure I agree exactly with the poster you are replying to, I am sure there is racism in regards to who gets credit for mathematical discovers. What I think more people find annoying is that this is another way rich people, sitting in their ivory towers, get to pretend to save the world from racism, without actually doing anything. It reminds me of America inventing the world Latinx and praising themselves as heros...while Latin America didn't care and didn't ever have an issue with previously used words.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Whole Latinx seems like trying to fix an issue that isn't even there. In a way that is more culturally insensitive than any level of sexism it tries to combat. The whole word doesn't in anyway work in language context... It is fundamentally imperialist culture, forcing English on others.
laxmin 5y ago
For e.g. the Pythagorean theorem - that was independently discovered by many cultures centuries or even millennia before the Greek mathematician. There is no need to refer it to his name, it could be the law of triangular squares or something (just an example, please do roast me for this) Also, the theorem is is mentioned in the Baudhayana Sulba-sutra of India in almost the same structure, word for word, written between 800 and 400 BCE. Today, it appears as if the Greeks are the fountainhead of all of western philosophy and world mathematics. In education, the western civilisation is studied as an inverted pyramid. A large base of goodness and greatness with some badness towards the sharp peak thrown in.. like how the US is a country founded on principles of freedom while the bad parts like slavery is seen as a small aberration. Contrast it with the treatment of India in the western press, education and academia. The base of India is the bad bad casteism, poverty, snake charmers, millions of gods, some sort of pagan religion, etc which gets all the focus while small goodnesses hardly gets any mention. Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek - from Advaita to Nagarjuna's Buddhist nihilism - ever heard of these? Blame your education. If you have heard, kudos, you are a statistical outlier. All this leads to the ingrained slant that we see on social media. India means rapists, poverty and what not. The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect. This is just an example. Thanks for reading. Disagree if you must, but let's enjoy the freedom of expression. [All hail the Internet. To the Human Brain and Evolution behind it, belongs all Glory.]
- mc32 5y ago
  If people in Russian, or Spanish or Chinese or Indians want to call the Pythagorean theorem by any other name, let them, by all means, who cares? Let them print their own books, publish their own web pages and have them call it by whatever they want. In English we get it from our own tradition, they can get it from their own. If they like they can very well make it up, who cares. Is it racist if Indians or Chinese, or Egyptians have another names for it? Like who cares about where the nomenclature came from. They can call it frankfurter instead, or porkbun, who cares. In English we call it the Pythagorean theorem. We have our names, they have theirs. What next, people who speak English remove any bible-inspired names and take up native names because using biblical names is racist by denying names 'native' to English? I guess Peter is out but William is in, right? Wait, wait, to further decolonize the English language itself, we'll abandon the Latin alphabet and go back to Fuþark, better? Ah, decolonization!
pyuser583 5y ago
It would be helpful if you gave actual examples of how math is racist, instead of making accusations of “blind denialism.” Instead of telling us how blind we are, why don’t you enlighten us?
danamit 5y ago
I think the issue with crediting should be acknowledged but not tried to be "corrected". And by "acknowledged" I mean if you are an adult you should know crediting is not accurate, and it's kinda just culture. Even modern crediting is not accurate. I would compare it to Christopher Columbus "discovering" America. You should know what most say/think/assume, and what's reality (America was inhabited, bad deeds done, Amerigo was first to America?...).
patrick451 5y ago
> It was by accident that some mathematicians were recognised by the west (Srinivasa Ramanujan for example). Others have to get into western academia to be recognised. So what? This dynamic is no different than the unpopular, nerdy reject crying to teacher that the popular kids are excluding him. On both accounts, it's very strange that outsider so strongly desires to be recognized and included by the group that supposedly hates them. Create your own reality.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
h9n 5y ago
If countering blind denialism means conducting mathematics with regard for anything other than mathematics, then blind denialism it must be. I think though this is falsely dichotomous, and hyperbolic, and that such assertions have only served to harm their respective political programs, not least of all by causing resistance to and embarrassment for them. Set anything against mathematics, and mathematics must win. The National Socialists rued dismissing general relativity as “Jewish Physics”, and the Marxist ideology was made to look ridiculous by the Soviet state’s support of Lysenkoism in opposition to “Bourgeois Biology”. When Stalin asked for a nuclear bomb, his scientists were explicitly denied the use of “Bourgeois Physics” (the very same theory the Nazis called “Jewish”). Ultimately, of course, the concession was made at the expense of the ideology. There is just physics, there is just biology, and there is no racist or colonial mathematics — there is just better or worse mathematics, the determination of which is mathematics itself.
funcDropShadow 5y ago
> There is racism in Mathematics, just as race has affected every other human endeavor. Would you mind to share examples of racism in math? I mean instances where people chose to cite or not cite someone because of their race? And how would that improve if we encourage scientist and mathematicians to favor race instead of applicability, relevance and scientific rigor as a criteria to select references? > To not acknowledge this is blind denialism. Perhaps you should make a stronger case for your hypothesis instead of blaming the reader.
antisinguIarity 5y ago
>Many of the original mathematical ideas that originated outside the west were simply discarded till somebody in the west came up with the same idea later (sometimes, centuries later) and are credited with the discovery. Could you name some? It's quite widely known that many ideas in mathematics are centuries (or millennia) old and came from other cultures and geographies. The very name of "algebra" refers to its Arabic roots, and was developed there during a golden era of sophistication and development many centuries ago. Is it a problem that ideas persist and move on, beyond their original geographical and cultural bounds? Personally, I don't think this is even the issue that the "de-colonise maths" crowd are trying to address. As I see it, this is the supposed root cause of the disparity in math grades between students of various ethnic groups, and the concept of "colonised maths" has been developed backwards from there.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
randomcarbloke 5y ago
save it for the "History of Mathematics" course then, but frankly contributions are correctly attributed in any study of mathematics, if you want more influence from poc build a time machine. But while ancient Greeks may look closer to my appearance than say a subsaharan african, I am not Greek and my culture in no way resembles Greek or ancient Greek. Enjoy your absurd "reality".

jterrys 5y ago

We're in this weird point of attribution where the discoveries and popularizations of white men (in a society they created and dominated mind you) must now be discredited because similar theories existed in cultures and languages that are extinct, or we know little about, or are poorly documented. Convergent discoveries. In essence, 'white mathematics' is wrong because mathematical concepts existed in ambiguous points in times in undocumented or undiscovered regions of the world. We must now attribute these regions because...white men are bad ok? Nevermind that we can historically correlate these discoveries in a somewhat chronological timeline of innovation in our own western history. We can reverse engineer these discoveries and see that other cultures had similarly convergent ideas that sometimes predate discoveries in western history. It's important to give proper attribution where attribution is due, and I actually have no problem with this. It's cool to know that ancient India had such an advanced mathematical field of study for example. We frame these in a racist structure because... white civilization is bad? Is basically the gist I'm getting out of this. Which is why I think you and frankly most people reading that article are getting offended. Especially when you acknowledge mathematics as being a purely logical language used to express abstractions

zackees 5y ago

> What’s the point, to achieve paralysis? Yes. Here's a one hour lecture from a KGB defector who's explains what's going on: 15 min lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI 1 hour lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cWbq1PoSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cWbq1PoSw TL;DR: It's intentional, it's going to get way worse, and if you get too loud in opposition you will find yourself ostracized and possibly without a job.

inter_netuser 5y ago

2010-2020: a decade of Field's medalists: Elon Lindenstrauss Israel Ngô Bảo Châu Vietnam Stanislav Smirnov Russia Cédric Villani France Manjul Bhargava. United States Maryam Mirzakhani Iran Martin Hairer Austria Akshay Venkatesh Australia Notably, without exception, all of them were associated with IAS at some point. Seems biggest consideration here for DurhamU would be to consider making their own very successful IAS and curate that institute membership to whatever criteria and see how it competes globally. Looking forward to their contribution to Ma. more on DurhamU: I cannot even locate their Math ranking, but with #701 ranking in Engineering, and #310 in Physics, seems they've got plenty of work ahead of them to even come close to the IAS. (usnews rankings) an irrelevant un-ranked institution making noise?

inter_netuser 5y ago

>Director of Graduate Studies of History Erik Loomis that “Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist.” History department dictates Math dept policy in DurhamU? "#263 in Best Global Universities" #54 in Arts in Humanities. #310 in Physics. #701 in Engineering. is this what a great STEM school looks like? rankings: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/durham-university-501717#rankings https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/du...