Posting on the contents of my email bag earlier in the week, I mentioned that many, many listeners and readers had directed my attention to the October 2nd statement by a committee of the Mathematical Association of America, the MAA, urging "all members of our profession" — so I guess that means mathematicians — to embrace social-justice activism. I promised to pass comment.
Let me just clarify my own approach to math. I can pretty much do this in my sleep, as I've been doing it for seventeen years, since I published the first of my two books about math.
If you write books about math, you get regular emails — I’m still getting them — from people who want you to read and pass opinions about their eighteen-page paper on Chebyshev polynomials or Morse Theory (which, trust me, has nothing whatever to do with dots and dashes).
My boilerplate reply is: "I am not a mathematician, only a journalist with a math degree. Please contact the math department of your nearest university."
There’s a bit more to be said than that. I love math, but it’s an unrequited love. Math doesn’t love me. I’m not much good at it. I discovered that when I took my degree.
I still love math, although math still doesn’t love me back. I moon about in the street under her balcony, hoping for a glimpse, occasionally playing a mournful love song on my lute.
Members of the stone-kicker fraternity might respond positively to that heading. "The Censure of Discourse on Race and Racism." Hey, maybe the MAA is taking a stand against the suppression and outlawing of race realism! "Anti-Science Policy"? Yay, let’s have more respect for careful empirical inquiry, no matter where it leads.
You might object that math is a rational inquiry, not an empirical one; and that there is no need for the MAA to take any position at all on race realism. Sure, yeah, but the heading as it stands is open to a positive interpretation.
Vain are the hopes of man! In fact, the statement is mainly an angry denunciation of the Trump administration’s bans on the anti-white indoctrination of the federal workforce.
I'll just quote the last paragraph to give you the flavor:
It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community. The time is now to move mathematics and education forward in pursuit of justice.
"Community" … "critical" … "conversations" … "racism" … "justice" … I don’t think they've omitted a single buzzword from the CultMarx lexicon.
And is it actually true that "mathematics is created by humans"? If the human race were to be wiped out by a rogue solar flare next Tuesday, would two plus two still be equal to four? If two stars in our galaxy went supernova, and then two more, would that be four supernovas altogether?
They still are: If you want to take up the topic, I recommend starting with Lakoff and Núñez’s 2001 book Where Mathematics Comes From.
One thing that is indisputably the case is that the math we have today was created by, or stands on foundations created by, persons of white-European or West Asian stock, well-nigh all of them male. I don’t think …
Sounds of screaming.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Never mind.
So how do I feel about this MAA statement? For a person like me, who reveres math, it is crapping on the altar.
Or to revert to my original metaphor: Here I am in the street under the balcony of my one true love, playing a melancholy ballad on my lute in hopes of touching her heart.
And there she is in her chamber with a dirty ignorant hippie doped up on meth, some lowlife she picked up in a bar, and they are making the Beast with Two Backs.
That’s how I feel. I am seriously contemplating canceling my MAA subscription.
A footnote to the preceding: A friend to whom I showed the MAA statement spotted a thing I'd missed. Of the eighteen signatories to the statement, twelve are female. (It looks like thirteen at first glance, but "Kamuela" is a male name, from Hawaiian.) Twelve out of eighteen: a little math tells me that is precisely two-thirds. Draw your own conclusions.
More demographic info on the signers
Math Community Members:
White Females
Anne Dudley, AMATYC Executive Director (White Female)
Carrie Diaz Eaton, Chair, Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics (White Hispanic Female, father from Peru)
Kamuela Yong [Pictured right], Committee for Minority Participation in Mathematics (Male, First Native Hawaiian Ph. D. in applied Math)
Omayra Ortega, [Pictured right], Editor-in-Chief of the NAM newsletter and NAM representative for Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences (Panamanian-American black Female)
Yun Kang, AMS representative for Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences (Asian Female, Mainland Chinese)
So the only people on this list who would actually qualify as minority are Kamuela Yong, the Hawaiian, and Omayra Ortega — unless you’re unaware that many white people in Spain, Italy, and South America have vowels on the ends of their names. Yun Kang, from Mainland China, is a minority in the U.S. general population, but not an underrepresented minority in math, or in the world: there are currently 1,439,323,776 people in China.
James A. M. Alvarez was born in San Antonio, Texas. He grew up near Saspamco, Texas, on a farm originally purchased by his great grandparents after they immigrated to Texas in 1890 from Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. His pursuit of higher education was encouraged by his parents, in particular by his mother Olga Mendoza Alvarez and his father Jonas Alvarez. His mother grew up in an era of intense discrimination against Mexican Americans, but managed to graduate from high school at the age of fifteen, eventually receive both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and teach elementary school for forty years. His father, who immigrated to the United States in 1963, is also a teacher.
What it amounts to is that Alvarez’s family has been in America since the 19th century, they owned their own farm, both his parents were teachers, and you can’t tell from his picture he’s Mexican.
