[[link removed]]

SUNDAY SCIENCE: THE FASCINATING STORY OF MATH IN A BOOK YOU CAN
ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND  
[[link removed]]


 

Alec Wilkinson
July 29, 2024
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy
Revell, highlights overlooked contributions to the field by ancient
thinkers, non-Westerners and women. _

Sophie Kowalevski, a 19th-century Russian who was hired in Sweden as
a mathematics professor, becoming the first woman to occupy such a
position., Fine Art Images/Getty Images

 

THE SECRET LIVES OF NUMBERS: A HIDDEN HISTORY OF MATH’S UNSUNG
TRAILBLAZERS, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell

William Morrow | 310 pp. | $32.99

Mathematics has been described as the longest continuous human
thought. This thought is typically said to have been held most
effectively by Western mathematicians and mainly by men. The narrative
supporting this notion regards mathematics as having its origins in
ancient Greece, and the mathematics done in other early cultures as
peripheral — barbarian science or “ethnomathematics,” even
though non-Western thinkers often practiced math that was more
advanced than what Europeans knew.

In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics
historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned
and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European
way of doing things is superior.”

Their book begins with prehistoric counting methods (one of the
earliest was based on the number 60, unlike our own base-10 system)
and goes on to the fourth-century Alexandrian woman Pandrosion, a
geometer who solved the difficult problem of doubling the volume of a
cube (ancient mathematicians lacked the algebra that makes this
straightforward), and Hypatia, who wrote mathematical commentaries,
including on Apollonius’ “Conics,” an investigation of circles,
ellipses and other shapes. Kitagawa and Revell speculate that Johannes
Kepler, who described the orbits of the planets in the 17th century,
may have been influenced by her contributions.

Overlooked or forgotten accomplishments by women mathematicians are a
recurring theme. There is a chapter on Sophie Kowalevski, a
19th-century Russian who became the first woman math professor, in
Sweden. Employing methods that no one before her had thought of using,
Kowalevski solved a recalcitrant problem involving the mathematics of
a spinning top. The French Academy of Sciences heard of her work and,
hoping to have her submit it, framed its annual prize in 1888 around
the spinning top problem. Kowalevski missed the deadline, and so the
academy extended it by three months. When the judges gave her the
prize, they increased the award money by nearly half, a rare example
of a woman mathematician being favored by and above male colleagues.

Kitagawa and Revell devote a chapter to the House of Wisdom, a kind of
exalted library and school in eighth-century Baghdad where Muhammad
ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, often referred to as the father of algebra, did
some of his work, and they highlight the women, called “human
computers,” at Harvard in the late 19th century who refined the
application of light wavelengths to classify stars. Toward the end of
the book, the authors discuss the glorious, god-soaked and essentially
self-taught early-20th-century Indian mathematician Srinavasa
Ramanujan, whose suppositions were so profound and wide-ranging that
their implications are still being considered.

As well as knowing history, Kitagawa and Revell are expert explainers
of mathematics. Anyone who has never been sure what an algorithm is
can understand the concept here, and their account of calculus is so
lucid and compact that I found it thrilling. It is with calculus,
though, that they slip, perhaps, into something like advocacy.

The invention of calculus is traditionally attributed to Isaac Newton
and Gottfried Leibniz, working independently in the 17th century.
However, Kitagawa and Revell write that “it is wrong to claim that
the origins of calculus lie with either Leibniz or Newton, as one
thing is certain: Neither of them got there first.” Instead, they
say, calculus was brought into being in India in the 14th century by a
mathematician named Madhava. Madhava taught at a school in Kerala and
made use of procedures that are subordinate elements of calculus.

Kitagawa and Revell cite the Indian mathematician George Gheverghese
Joseph, who wrote about the matter in a 2009 book, “A Passage to
Infinity.” Joseph, they say, “argues that there was a pathway for
knowledge from India to the West,” which suggests that “Leibniz
and Newton could have been influenced by the school in Kerala.”

The claim is based in part on the possibility that Jesuits brought
Madhava’s work to Europe, but in his book Joseph writes that a
“painstaking trawl of the mass of manuscripts” has provided “no
direct evidence of the conjectured transmission.” Perhaps, he
suggests, European sailors used Madhava’s work in navigation. It
might then have been absorbed into European practices without anyone
knowing, centuries later, where it had come from. This would be a case
of someone who told someone who told someone and so on, more than 600
years ago, a circumstance virtually impossible to substantiate. On the
other hand, novel discoveries rarely stay where they were made.

Madhava’s work serves to make the point that complex mathematics
belongs to all people and all cultures in all periods, and that to
dismiss historical work as ethnomathematics is to express a prejudice.
When one acknowledges the intellectual reach of these ancient
achievements and the love of pure thought they suggest, it leads one
to wonder where else we might look for illumination and what we might
find.

_ALEC WILKINSON is the author of “A Divine Language: Learning
Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age.”_

__

How Colorful Ribbon Diagrams Became the Face of Proteins
[[link removed]]
Yasemin Saplakoglu
Quanta Magazine
Proteins are often visualized as cascades of curled ribbons and
twisted strings, which both reveal and conceal the mess of atoms that
make up these impossibly complex molecules.
August 23, 2024

* Science
[[link removed]]
* mathematics
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* Women
[[link removed]]
* colonialism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]