3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Mathematics has been called the “queen of the sciences,” and today, much like a political sovereign, mathematical concepts govern aspects of nearly every facet of our lives. Because mathematics has come to form the baseline of today's innovative technologies, it is not a stretch to say that math often mediates our relations to the material world. Asking how math, science, technology, and culture fit together, therefore, is a political question. We might also ask, then: is mathematics active or complicit in racist, classist, sexist, or ableist oppression? As mathematics began changing the way that Europeans related to the world of matter and energy in the early modern period, it also began to reorder the world according to abstract, symbolic systems whose applications and manipulations of material entities—human and nonhuman—continue to reverberate across the centuries. Examining the encounters of early modern European scientists with Indigenous Amerindian Nations and their empirical methods of world-making in the Atlantic world, this class will examine how famous European mathematicians and logistical thinkers materially aided the colonial expansion of the British empire by developing more exact techniques for navigation, military maneuvers, agriculture, literary poetics, and political rhetoric. An equal part of this class will also be devoted to thinking through Indigenous systems of knowledge known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK. This class, therefore, is specifically designed to train students in interdisciplinary thinking. Social sciences and humanities majors will find models to conceptualize the cultural and political significance of mathematics. STEM students will be encouraged to think about the material consequences of the abstract thought systems they are trained to manipulate in their courses.