NATURE Magazine: Mathematics Needs To Be Decolonized Because Too Many Theorems And Techniques Are Named After Gauss
02/04/2023
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From Nature:

30 January 2023
Charting a course to make maths truly universal

Mathematicians leading decolonization efforts say that building knowledge-sharing partnerships with communities is key.
Rachel Crowell

… Maths is built on a modern history of elevating the achievements of one group of people: white men. “Theorems or techniques have names associated to them and most of the time, those names are of nineteenth-century French or German men,” such as Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré and Carl Friedrich Gauss, all of whom were white, says John Parker, head of the mathematical sciences department at Durham University, UK. This means that the accomplishments of people of other genders and races have often been pushed aside, preventing maths from being a level playing field.

Personally, I’m pretty proud to belong to the same species as Gauss.

But that’s just me.


[Comment at Unz.com]

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