Comment on STEM Naming Double Standard (Short)
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months agoBand 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 book to enter into the subject. I really enjoyed reading it for the history of mathematical analysis course I took for my masters. researchgate.net/…/249740664_Eurocentrism_in_the_…
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 “idiotic” in itself.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Then you’re missing the point. Naming or bragging rights about who came up with what first is pretty ridiculous, and has no benefit to society anyway. I think the better question is “Who actually cares?”.
Nobody is going run around to various cultures to correct the historic record now that we know different. If that were the case, then even at your own insistence, we’d have to REALLY find out who had the concept of what first, and chances are the majority of those things wouldn’t be coming from who you thought.
Nobody is going to waste the energy and effort of doing that. That’s insane. The popular terminology is what it is because of the propagation of it as such, and that’s all their is to it. There’s no sinister task at hand to ensure it doesn’t change, and thinking so, yes, is idiotic. It’s like being a child and throwing a tantrum because someone else at your kickball game got some claps for a play and nobody gave you any.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
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.