David Nirenberg and Ricardo L. Nirenberg, “Numbers and Humanity,” Liberties Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 28-50 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mathematics and Liberature: Fajfer's Ten Letters
2016
The article discusses liberature in the context of its mathematical qualities. In this trend which inextricably connects the textual and physical layer of the work, each element in the book is expected to be created according to a certain formula which should bring a holistic piece of literature. After 1999, a great number of mathematically-oriented works have appeared which are strictly liberary. In the presentation, I base on the theoretical idea behind liberature when discussing Zenon Fajfer's liberary work Ten Letters (Pol. Dwadzieścia jeden liter). This innovative piece is analysed mainly from the point of view of geometry and play with numbers, which is visible already in the title: the ten-letter phrase " ten letters. " Mathematical qualities are indicated on various layers of the piece: the physical, the textual, and the visual, but especially in its form. The game of numbers is found not only where it is obviously visible and essential to understand the message, but also in places which might not have been intended. Liberature is analysed as literature but at the same time, it is shown not to be literature, and in this respect, to be mathematical at the core.
TPCS 168: "Mathematics and its ideologies An anthropologist's observations" by Jan Blommaert
, in a book I enjoyed reading, tells the story of how RC emerged out of Cold War concerns in the US. It was the RAND Corporation that sought, at the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear era, to create a new scientific paradigm that would satisfy two major ambitions. First, it should provide an objective, scientific grounding for decision-making in the nuclear era, when an ill-considered action by a soldier or a politician could provoke the end of 2 2 the world as we knew it. Second, it should also provide a scientific basis for refuting the ideological ("scientific") foundations of communism, and so become the scientific bedrock for liberal capitalist democracy and the "proof" of its superiority. This meant nothing less than a new political science, one that had its basis in pure "rational" objectivity rather than in partisan, "irrational" a priori's. Mathematics rose to the challenge and would provide the answer. Central to the problem facing those intent on constructing such a new political science was what Durkheim called "the social fact" -the fact that social phenomena cannot be reduced to individual actions, developments or concerns -or, converted into a political science jargon, the idea of the "public" or "masses" performing collective action driven by collective interests. This idea was of course central to Marxism, but also pervaded mainstream social and political science, including the (then largely US-based) Frankfurt School and the work of influential American thinkers such as Dewey. Doing away with it involved a shift in the fundamental imagery of human beings and social life, henceforth revolving around absolute (methodological) individualism and competitiveness modeled on economic transactions in a "free market" by people driven exclusively by self-interest. Amadae describes how this shift was partly driven by a desire for technocratic government performed by "a supposedly 'objective' technocratic elite" free from the whims and idiosyncracies of elected officials (2003: 31). These technocrats should use abstract models -read mathematical models -of "systems analysis", and RAND did more than its share developing them. "Rational management" quickly became the key term in the newly reorganized US administration, and the term stood for the widespread use of abstract policy and decisionmaking models. These models, as I said, involved a radically different image of humans and their social actions. The models, thus, did not just bring a new level of efficiency to policy making, they reformulated its ideological foundations. And Kenneth Arrow provided the key for that with his so-called "impossibility theorem", published in his Social Choice and Individual Values (1951; I use the 1963 edition in what follows). Arrow's theorem quickly became the basis for thousands of studies in various disciplines, and a weapon of mass political destruction used against the Cold War enemies of the West. Arrow opens his book with a question about the two (in his view) fundamental modes of social choice: voting (for political decisions) and market transactions (for economic decisions). Both modes are seemingly collective, and thus opposed to dictatorship and cultural convention, where a single individual determines the choices. Single individuals, Arrow asserts, can be rational in their choices; but "[c]an such consistency be attributed to collective modes of choice, where the wills 3 3 of many people are involved?" (1963:2). He announces that only the formal aspects of this issue will be discussed. But look what happens. Using set-theoretical tools and starting from a hypothetical instance where two, then three perfectly rational individuals need to reach agreement, observing a number of criteria, he demonstrates that logically, such a rational collective agreement is impossible. Even more: in a smart and surely premeditated lexical move, in which one of Arrow's criteria was "nondictatorship" (i.e. no collective choice should be based on the preferences of one individual), Arrow demonstrated that the only possible "collective" choices would in fact be dictatorial ones. A political system, in other words, based on the notion of the common will or common good, would of necessity be a dictatorship. In the age of Joe Stalin, this message was hard to misunderstand. And he elaborates this, then, in about hundred pages of prose, of which the following two fragments can be an illustration. (I shall provide them as visual images, because I am about ready to embark on my own little analysis, drawn from contemporary semiotic anthropology.) Fig 1: from p90, Arrow 1963
The (Very) Human Nature of STEM: Truth, Beauty, and Mathematics
Philosophy of Education
presidential address to a crowd of professional mathematicians, all working in what many consider a rarified and highly abstract field of study. His impassioned speech, "Mathematics for Human Flourishing," prompted long overdue self-reflection within the university mathematics community and beyond. Mathematics, he claimed, draws on "basic human desires" in order to "cultivate virtues that help people flourish." 1 In her essay, "STEM Education in the Age of 'Fake News': A John Stuart Mill Perspective," Guoping Zhao also describes a kind of human flourishing. Inspired by Mill's strikingly relevant rationale, she recognizes the power of STEM disciplines to cultivate the "art of thinking." This is crucial for "the proper functioning of a human being" and by extension the proper functioning of a democratic society. 2 To maintain a healthy skepticism is to flourish. To recognize fallacy is to flourish. To seek truth is to flourish. In fact, Francis Su identified "truth" as one of the human desires driving mathematical engagement, along with play, beauty, justice, and love. I suggest that all of these desires help to advance the project of democracy. At the risk of sounding a little more like Keats than Mill, truth and beauty are the two desires, the two drivers of inquiry that I wish to pursue more deeply today. Zhao thoughtfully uses the term "truth-seeking," which is marked by action, by human endeavor. The verb "seeking" helps us in a few ways. It challenges the teleological view of mathematics as an adjudicator of truth and relocates agency to our hands and minds. We are sense-makers, modelers of our world. (And by "we," I include younger generations. They can and do critique the institutions that threaten to bankrupt them, the technology that both connects and divides them, and the societal injustices that haunt them.) "Seeking" also
The Mathematics Enthusiast, 2018
In the early 1960s, Ursula Le Guin wrote 'The Masters', a short novel that offers a sharp contrast to the 'maths for all' discourse of contemporary mathematics education reforms. Le Guin writes of a world-Edun-where 'mathematical prohibition' is law. Mathematical reason is banned for all people by the Priests of Edun, and failure to obey is punishable by death. Despite the threat of this totalitarian anti-math regime, some citizens create a collective heterotopia in which they practice mathematics in secret. Le Guin's story is an opportunity to conduct a thought experiment: 'what if maths became forbidden?' This 'what if' experiment (Haraway 2016) allows us to consider how statements such as 'maths for all' or 'no to maths' are grounded in rationalisations that construe mathematical subjectivity as a determined actor for citizen agency in contemporary societies. The paper suggests that we need to move beyond a 'maths for all' or 'no to maths' dichotomy by interrogating how they both operate as 'states of exception' around politics of fear producing in/exclusions.