https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30997004

Awful takes from awful people

whenever you hear the word “decolonization” you pretty much know right off the bat that you are talking to a Marxist. These people have no real knowledge of history, or any other subject for that matter and are generally best ignored or ridiculed. Colonialism has pretty much existed since ancient times and there’s nothing inherently “white” about it… it’s just part of HUMAN experience.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I dunno if this will be hot take here, hope it isn't, but there definitely needs to be a de-whitening of math. All my good profs were ethnic whites from the former warsaw bloc (like Polish or Romanian) or were actual POC like Indians. But they were all sessionals. All the senior profs and people in charge of departments were white, glad they were taking some kind of initiative on sort of decolonizing a math department but it doesn't really count if you just hire ethnic whites on one year contracts instead of POC in tenure track positions... It's kind of shitty because the rest of the world has a really rich history of mathematics, like Brahmagupta inventing zero - which is underappreciated in a post invention of integers world - or Ramanujan, or Chinese Remainder Theorem (invented in China a long ass time ago), and so on. I guess they'd say it shouldn't matter but I dunno, I had to dig into the history of mathematics to find out a lot of this stuff, you always get the impression that the Greeks invented Geometry and then Euler invented everything else and Europe was the centre of math for hundreds of years, so now everyone else is coming to learn from European mathematics as good students instead of being active participants with their own legitimate history and brilliance. It's especially important for math because so much depends on seeing a unusual connection from one area to another to prove or disprove longstanding conjectures.

    • becauseoftheblood [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It does kind of get into the idea that people from more white cultures were much more obsessed with putting their name on things and attaching their identity to ideas that weren't actually diving real world problems at the time. Like the Chinese remainder theorem solved a real world problem whereas the stuff European mathematicians were doing was more akin to philosophy. It wasn't until recent history that we've made use of some really old mathematical ideas. And like not to say other cultures weren't focused on more theoretical stuff, but the white hegemony would definitely discard whatever they did