Re:“Decolonising Math”: Durham U Asks Professors to Consider...
by Someone on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @03:48AM
(#30999765)
I agree that we should look at maths to see whether/where it’s racist, but don’t think the single example of Pythagoras is a strong enough argument.
Firstly, if I had to guess and put a race label on him, I wouldn’t guess he was white. He was (reportedly, we know very little of him) born on Samos, an island near the coast of Turkey.
Also: “Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek”? I think nobody knows of Greek systems of philosophy, either. “Democracy” is about the only thing, and that’s severely mangled/improved from Athenian reality, where the overwhelming majority of the population didn’t have a vote.
And “The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect.”, IMO, is not a fair statement. Certainly, in the 1960s and 1970s leftish academia admired some aspects of India. That has decreased a bit, but I don’t think it has fully gone away.
But yes, history is written by the winners, and Europe happened to start the scientific revolution, while having better access to Greek and Arabic texts (who gave them not only the words algebra and algorithm) than to Indian ones.
Firstly, if I had to guess and put a race label on him, I wouldn’t guess he was white. He was (reportedly, we know very little of him) born on Samos, an island near the coast of Turkey.
Secondly, misnaming theorems and inventions happens all the times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misnamed_theorems has some examples from maths. See also https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626242-100-the-word..., https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14461-five-scientific..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
Also: “Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek”? I think nobody knows of Greek systems of philosophy, either. “Democracy” is about the only thing, and that’s severely mangled/improved from Athenian reality, where the overwhelming majority of the population didn’t have a vote.
And “The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect.”, IMO, is not a fair statement. Certainly, in the 1960s and 1970s leftish academia admired some aspects of India. That has decreased a bit, but I don’t think it has fully gone away.
But yes, history is written by the winners, and Europe happened to start the scientific revolution, while having better access to Greek and Arabic texts (who gave them not only the words algebra and algorithm) than to Indian ones.