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A couple more thoughts on this bit of advice in response to @extremefriday 's call for suggestions for overhauling her department'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
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
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 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's wrong with this. Hoping (but not expecting) this will change going forward https://msc2020.org/#/msc2010 4/n
This is the kind of structure you get with what Grattan-Guinness called the 'royal road to me' in historiography; others have other memorable formulations, e.g. 'Whig history'
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/007327539002800202
5/n
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/007327539002800202
5/n
Finding a 'royal road to me' 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 6/n
See, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509951 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 7/n
This idea has legs, even today, e.g. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13397.html 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's "From 'savage' to 'primitive'" 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 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
11/n
11/n
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'd often like to, there are lots of reasons we can'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'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'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're seeing is the hegemonic success of the modern West in defining what counts as math/science. 18/17
Part of what we'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 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
