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A couple more thoughts on this bit of advice in response to @extremefriday & #39;s call for suggestions for overhauling her department& #39;s math history course.
Confining non-Western traditions to the past is a huge known problem in #histmath and #histSTM pedagogy and scholarhsip. 1/n https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1125396791560740864">https://twitter.com/MBarany/s...
Confining non-Western traditions to the past is a huge known problem in #histmath and #histSTM pedagogy and scholarhsip. 1/n https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1125396791560740864">https://twitter.com/MBarany/s...
It is so ingrained in math history that the @amermathsoc and @zbMATH Mathematics Subject Classification bakes it into how research is classified, starting mostly with a list of place/region/"civilization" identifiers then pivoting to time periods https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/msc/msc2010.html?t=01Axx&btn=Current">https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscine... 2/n
The transition, "Islamic (Medieval)" is the perfect illustration of this way of thinking: math belonged to distinct past civilizations until medieval Europeans inherited it from Islamic scholars, at which point it started developing in a single unified European time. 3/n
The public comment period for the MSC2020 revision is over, but rest assured someone (me) pointed out what& #39;s wrong with this. Hoping (but not expecting) this will change going forward https://msc2020.org/#/msc2010 ">https://msc2020.org/... 4/n
This is the kind of structure you get with what Grattan-Guinness called the & #39;royal road to me& #39; in historiography; others have other memorable formulations, e.g. & #39;Whig history& #39;
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/007327539002800202
5/n">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/007327539002800202
5/n">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...
Finding a & #39;royal road to me& #39; was an explicit goal of math history dating to its origins as an area of study (arguably predating science history) as a branch of mathematics and philosophy.
See, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509951">https://www.jstor.org/stable/10... 6/n
See, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509951">https://www.jstor.org/stable/10... 6/n
The idea was understanding how mathematical concepts "evolved" in history shows the best way to learn and understand them in the present.
This idea has legs, even today, e.g. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13397.html">https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13... 7/n
This idea has legs, even today, e.g. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13397.html">https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13... 7/n
The geographic/historical structure in the math historiography reflected in the MSC developed between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Not coincidentally, this is a notorious period of scientific orientalism / scientific racism in European scholarship 8/n
Developing new theories of biological evolution to account for the evolution of societies and ideas, these scholars depicted far-away peoples as frozen in time, living fossils of less-evolved stages on a single scale of civilization. 9/n
A classic #histSTM article on this is Peter Bowler& #39;s "From & #39;savage& #39; to & #39;primitive& #39;" but this is a well-trod theme by now with lots of great critical scholarship. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/from-savage-to-primitive-victorian-evolutionism-and-the-interpretation-of-marginalized-peoples/FF9369EB3FC2A52A6D0EE051CEC082A8">https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour... 10/n
Part of the move is to collapse centuries or millennia of thought and culture into uniform blobs of timeless civilizational contributions -- Babylonian astronomy, Egyptian fractions, Indian numerals, Chinese calculations, etc. -- and throwing out anything unrecognizable
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One reason this view persists is that scholars always have to start with what they know -- linguistically, culturally, mathematically, etc. -- writing math history in the West tends to mean privileging Western sources and perspectives. 12/n
Another reason is scholarly narratives and pedagogical frameworks build off of each other. As much as we& #39;d often like to, there are lots of reasons we can& #39;t just pick up and build new frames from scratch. 13/n
In my ideal world, my classes could be as nuanced about Chinese mathematics from 400 vs 500 years ago as about Western European probability theory from 150 vs 250 years ago. But I have a HUGE literature in English to draw on for the latter, and less for the former 14/n
There are two basic pedagogical responses lots of people (myself included) try to use, and courses need both:
1) cast a wider net for sources and topics; encourage interest and research that breaks the mold 15/n
1) cast a wider net for sources and topics; encourage interest and research that breaks the mold 15/n
And 2) teach the history of how the narratives we *do* have got that way. Don& #39;t shy away from calling out racist forebears. We know an awful lot about certain topics because they preoccupied awful (/misguided/blindered/etc) people, and this context is critical. 16/n
I& #39;ll end the thread here, but please share your own ways of breaking out of the foreign-static-past view!
17/17
17/17
OK, I lied, one more dimension I meant to add:
Part of what we& #39;re seeing is the hegemonic success of the modern West in defining what counts as math/science. 18/17
Part of what we& #39;re seeing is the hegemonic success of the modern West in defining what counts as math/science. 18/17
This applies retrospectively for what is recognizable as math/sci and in the moment as research gets absorbed and appropriated through modern Western frames/institutions. 19/17
So a crucial strategy many use as well is
3) reclaim the erased/appropriated non-Western parts of what we think of as modern Western science, *and* show the history of appropriation and its effects. 20/17
3) reclaim the erased/appropriated non-Western parts of what we think of as modern Western science, *and* show the history of appropriation and its effects. 20/17
See this recent piece by James Delbourgo on his own attempts to work with/against existing frameworks for a global history of science course https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0073275319831582">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1... 21/17
Also of course talk about how the "West" itself is constructed and contingent, but that hopefully is part of the above strategies. 22/17
