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Cake day: July 17th, 2024

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  • But did you even read my full comment. Aside from the general trend in names, it brings up the bigger subject of erasure of non-western thinkers from mathematics.

    If nobody cared there wouldn’t be an entire adacemic subfield pertaining to this.

    Also what does a random historical essay about the end of the golden age of science in the arabic world pertain to erasure of non-western contributions in mathematics?


  • Band aids don’t have the implication that whoever invented them was band-aid.

    Naming a mathematical theorem after someone has the implication that they were the inventor. Obviously if it happens in some cases it’s not too problematic. But if there’s a general trend of removing certain groups from mathematics it does become one.

    For example the myth that mathematics was mainly invented by greeks in commonly taught in schools around the european and anglophone world.

    There’s a real phenomenon of eurocentrism and erasure of mathematical contributions from outside the west. This is a well documented problematic which has had dozens of books and papers written about it. So I don’t think your dismissal as idiotic is warranted. Obviously that was just some random guy in a 30 second video which was made to be engaging as much as informative, but it raises an interesting subject.

    If you want to delve further this is an interesting paper to enter into the subject. I enjoyed reading it for the history of mathematical analysis course I took for my masters. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249740664_Eurocentrism_in_the_History_of_Mathematics_the_Case_of_the_Kerala_School

    Anyways, I didn’t make that video, and it is obviously far from perfect. But your dismissal of it as “idiotic” strikes me to be oddly closed minded.