My parent made the claim that "identity politics" are invading archaeology, and my point is that "identity politics" have always been there -- it's no longer acceptable to explicitly forbid women from the sciences, but that doesn't mean that implicit gatekeeping isn't happening.

My strong, loosely held, opinion is that rigorous mathematics is the hardest of sciences. Where mathematicians reject computer proofs over all-human proofs, I balk at their lack of rigor and consider their stance unscientific.

Mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth: we state axioms, and elaborate proofs based entirely upon those axioms. Axioms are assumptions, and we freely acknowledge that results are only guaranteed to hold if the axioms are satisfied. Logicians are seen as philosophers, but I hold them as equals.

There's a perspective that "science" deals purely with the natural world, and mathematicians aren't bothered by the surreality of their axioms. The way I see it is, these are truths that can extend beyond even our universe, should anything more exist. And occasionally, pure mathematical results come hundreds of years before natural observations require them -- what looks absurdly inapplicable now might not in a few generations.

However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth. The scientific method and experiments allows you to inductively make more and more accurate predictions about the object of your study (most often the natural world), but it will never give the deductive truth like math.

So rather than classifying almost all sciences as lacking rigor, I myself consider math to simply be not a science, but something else, as implied with my question.

I guess it depends on ones definition of "science". Is any process resulting in knowledge a science, or does it have to involve the scientific method, hypotheses, experiments.

Haha, see? You can call yourself a scientist and nobody will bat an eye! Computer Science was once a branch of mathematics; and now it's a full-fledged field. But as you note, the pure-math roots still shine brightly. I'm somewhat of a computer scientist myself; I peddle in algorithms, graph theory, and more generally discrete math. Which brings me to a point I forgot to make: fundamentally, I'm an experimentalist. Not all mathematicians are.

> However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth.

Happy to live with this disagreement, but not all mathematicians find ground truths. For example, there's a significant industry on "conditional proofs" in number theory -- they assume that the Riemann Hypothesis, or even the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, is true, and discover results based on that. Others work on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. They collect evidence, and report on it; similar to the 5-sigma proofs I derided earlier -- the distinction is that they only call things proofs when they're actual proofs.

In our shared world, there is the question of P vs NP. We've got a hypothesis (I tend to believe that NP won't be constructively equal to P; but I wouldn't be terribly surprised by a nonconstructive proof). Folks devote their lives to examining this dichotomy: given a problem class, resolve it into P or NP -- I call that an experiment!

I claim that endeavors like the above are actually following the scientific method. Only we use somewhat different language. I've seen snobbery on both sides^ -- scientists and mathematicians are happy to build and maintain a fence. And I find that sad.

^and, oops, I did that with my 5-sigma dismissal

The idea that women might favor naming based on textiles or clothing appears purely based on stereotypes about women, and seems a bit offensive to me.