Durham’s maths problem

More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time. For too long the subject has been dominated by racist stuff like adding things up or multiplying etc. Hopefully soon there will be room for students, when faced with a question such as ‘what is four plus four?’ to eschew the didacticism of white supremacy by answering ‘eight’ and suggest instead a number which they think feels intuitively right, such as 7,231. (Or indeed any number: it is not for me, as a privileged white straight male, to suggest to people who have been the victims of structural racism an alternative answer to the question ‘what is four plus four?’ They are perfectly able to do that themselves.)

We are not quite at that stage yet, mind. The current decolonising programme simply demands of staff that they start referencing a few of those really famous and eminent black mathematicians when giving examples, because: ‘The question of whether we have allowed western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western authors to dominate the field of literature.’

No indeed. Staff, then, are being encouraged (if not forced) to find brilliant mathematicians from beyond the West. Looking through Google’s inventory of the most important mathematicians, there are plenty of Chinese scholars to shove in the list, plus some Arabs, Indians and the occasional Egyptian – although they are probably taught pretty widely already. But no Sub-Saharan Africans or Australian aborigines or Tuvans, and very few Hispanics. Perhaps the lecturers will be able to find a way around these new and stupid, virtue-cringing strictures by including the Greeks under the heading ‘black’.