Unlocked BE21: Decolonising Maths

The history of maths and stats is deeply political, and deeply entwined with both empire and the resistance to it.

References:
Padmanabhan, T., Padmanabhan, V., Padmanabhan, T., & Padmanabhan, V. (2019). Calculus Developed in South India. The Dawn of Science: Glimpses from History for the Curious Mind, 213-223.
Davis, M. (2002). Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the third world. Verso Books.

If you have a statistic or a chart you'd like us to talk about contact us.
Twitter: @StatInsigPod

Bart can be found @SnitchinOrwell on Twitter, or at

[ethang]

I really can't see any reason as to why math in particular is so important to decolonize, even after listening to this entire podcast episode. Your points basically boil down to, extremely rudimentary mathematics was used to help aid in atrocities, a lot of mathematics were developed outside of Europe, and the mathematics taught today typically have colonial origins. I guess I'll break down each point in a list for convenience.

1. Math was used in atrocities - I mean, yeah? Obviously! You need to use statistics and accounting to manage large scale logistics of any kind. The use of misleading statistics is not inherent to colonialism, it's just a generally immoral thing to do. It's a type of fraud. Every professional of any kind should be taught not to use their power for wrongdoing, I don't see how mathematical wrongdoing funded by imperialist states are any more special than other wrongdoing. Why should all other ways in which statistics could be used to commit fraud be less important to talk about than in which the way a colonial state uses statistics to commit fraud? There is seemingly no valid moral argument for this other than "because I personally think it's more important."

2. We never talk about the math invented outside of Europe - Fair enough, I mean if a math class goes over the historical origins of the math they are teaching, then they should at least mention the other non western cultures that discovered that math independently if there were multiple independent discoveries. But not all math classes care about historical origins, sometimes we're just trying to teach the concept.
If I'm a teacher trying to teach my students trig identities and basic geometry, do you think going through all of the many different complicated discoveries of those same properties will help my students grasp the concept? Do you think going through a thousand different murky explanations of the concept with a million different proofs and notations will make understanding it easier for those struggling? Obviously not, this is why when we don't talk of historical origins we just stick to one notation and often only expose one proof. It's because over the average, it's the most accessible way to teach the concept. Higher accessibility to subjects like mathematics means a more egalitarian society.

3. Math notation, proofs, literature, etc. taught today is almost always European in origin - A lot of advanced mathematics you learn in college that was discovered in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries have no other cultural origins other than western origins. They were discovered exclusively in the west, and that math has enormously important impact in a very wide range of applications.
There is no indigenous south american Fourier transform, they didn't have the kind of academic culture necessary to develop and record the mathematical concepts necessary to discover that. If an indigenous american chooses to become an engineer, I can't teach them a decolonized version of Fourier transform because it's an inherently foreign concept to the indigenous culture. Their native understanding of Fourier transform *_is_* the original European discovery of the concept.
15:41 is a perfect demonstration of this. Bart I presume, postulates a concrete idea of publishing decolonized mathematics onto a blockchain of some kind, and Tess then murmurs after stating blockchain itself is colonized technology. The blockchain, is a truly unique technology, it doesn't have technological alternatives of different cultural origins. If you want to make decentralized digital ledgers there is only one class of algorithms to do that and those are blockchain algorithms. So, if we were decolonizing computer science in this instance, we'd just have to say "unfortunately we haven't quite figured that out yet" or "we can't teach you that" if someone asked if the idea behind blockchain had been invented. You literally could not teach them how to be a computer scientist, without teaching them supposedly colonial computer science!

And all this boils down to the broader point that math isn't really cultural. I've been saying stuff like Fourier transform is an inherently western idea, but it really isn't. It's not inherent to any culture. It's a universal concept that works in all realities, beyond our universe even. It doesn't matter how you teach it, you can't impose colonial ideas with it because the concept does not hold the capacity for supporting western values. It is quite literally a fundamental objective fact of reality. It's like saying we have to decolonize the concept of gravity. How can the concept that things fall to the ground have the capacity for instilling cultural values? It doesn't, but if you obsess over cultural origins and notation and the medium behind how these universal facts are communicated, than yeah I guess you can convince yourself that the mathematics of Leonhard Euler is actually European and not just math in general. Math is math. It is not European or Arabic or Indian. It is simply math.

[umbraemilitos]

20:57 is it wrong to separate the application of math, the history of math, and the discipline of math into three separate concepts when thinking about decolonization?

[OwenCampbell-kogy]

Everything uses math dip, even racist land surveying population dynamics

[mrslunk]

Interesting discussion, but I'm left with one overarching comment; wouldn't it be wiser and more beneficial to students to teach the history and philosophy of mathematical and statistical thought? That is, to "re-contextualise" the development of mathematics.

Including things like early measurement in ancient Egypt, the development of modern number systems in ancient India, pre-newtonian calculus from the Greeks and mathematics in imperial China. As well as Fisher's eugenics turn, the really poor behavior of the Leibniz and Newton (one of many petty enlightenment feuds), the treatment of Alan Turing, and Black-Scholes contribution to the GFC, along with all other politically instrumental uses of mathematics you have mentioned.
Along the way, you could also touch on the politics of theorem naming, and the long list of people who missed out having their discovery named after them because they either weren't in the right social class, or were taken advantage of.

It should also include a discussion of the major philosophies of mathematics: Platonism, Social Constructivism, Formalism, etc, along with some of the challenges with holding one of those particular positions. (I.e. Wigners "unreasonable effectiveness"). This stuff is not taught in maths/science degrees in Australia/NZ (if anywhere), and it should be.

(edit: grammar)

[aloysius_music]

This is an interesting and important topic, and I enjoyed the vid. I'd ask that you mb reconsider the structure a bit - takes like 20 mins of yapping to get to a clear example of deconolising maths. I appreciate the value of context but think the presentation could be clearer.

[Logqnty]

this is why people don't take the humanities seriously. please don't bring this into the sciences 😭

[burgercide]

I think we can all learn from Vivek Chibber's take on orientalism.

[annaclarafenyo]

Math didn't start with Newton in the 1600s, it started with Cantor in the late 1800s. There is nothing of significance before 1900. This is not a leftist video, but nonsense.

[anteep]

we need to stop using maths altogether,

[lucidglobalwarning]

If western maths (which is really Arab maths) gets actually used by the native people then then the maths is not colonialisation maths but is actually misappropriated maths.