Can Maths be Ideological?

Maths is understandably associated with objective purity and thought of as being the one discipline most free of contamination/influence by social ideology. However, there have been plenty of attempts to use maths to advance an ideological agenda. Not that this is evil per se — I think it’s uncontrovercial that maths can be used to benefit humanity and benefitting humanity is an agenda in itself. Still, the social forces that use maths might not be ones you’ll agree with.

The easiest way to do this is in maths education, especially of children. Word problems bring in a social element as to what kinds of questions are worth posing, what’s worth solving and what a good solution looks like. This is best seen in extreme scenarios. Here are some maths problems from Nazi texbooks:

The Jews are aliens in Germany–in 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the per cent of aliens? [Source]

The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million RM. How many houses at 15,000 RM each could have been built for that amount? To keep a mentally ill person costs approx. 4 RM per day, a cripple 5.50 RM, a criminal 3.50 RM. Many civil servants receive only 4 RM per day, white collar employees barely 3.50 RM, unskilled workers not even 2 RM per head for their families. (a) Illustrate these figures with a diagram. According to conservative estimates there are 300,000 mentally ill, epileptics, etc. in care. (b) How much do these people cost to keep in total, at a cost of 4 RM per head? (c) How many marriage loans at 1000 RM each … could be granted from this money? [Source]

These are interesting in that a milder but similar tactic is employed all the time. This is JAQing off (Just Asking Questions). You ask a factual question that has blatant ideological presuppositions and when challenged retreat to the “I’m just asking questions” or the “facts are facts” defence. One can go too far in being anti-postmodernist, contrary to what’s sometimes implied even factual statements do have social meaning. Usually it’s just not as extreme.

Of course this can exist on the left as well. The father of Storm (the child I plan to do a post about later, whose parents caused a shitstorm later by not revealing Storm’s gender) apparently wrote a progressive textbook called Math that Matters. The book “urges teachers to stop using everyday objects in maths questions and instead work with issues such as homophobia, poverty, child abuse and racial profiling to ‘spark discussion’ and increase students’ interest in ‘social justice advocacy’. (Sample question: A Chinese worker who makes my shoes earns what percentage of the price I paid for them?)”. I say apparently since it is a Daily Mail story, to which here’s the link. The usual warnings about the story potentially melting your brain apply.

But my absolute favourite for its sheer silliness is Christian calculus. A professor of Trinity Christian College had pages of devotionals related to maths content. The university has redesigned their site and it’s no longer available. Thank the FSM for the Way Back Machine, which has archived the pages for posterity!

There are so many wonderful bits that I’ll have to summarise a few — but do browse the originals.

• God is steadfast and endures forever — meaning his rate of change function is zero.
• Just like the differential operator transforms a function into a completely new function so too are we completely transformed in Christ.
• The exponential function models the increase of God’s love for humanity with time and the idea of paying a kindness forward.
• In calculus we often work with an error bound. God’s requires perfection meaning he requires |Standard of God’s Law – Our imperfect actions| = 0 and hence we need Christ. QED.
• The gospel uses the standard logical operators. “IF we say we are without sin, [THEN] we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
• God’s punishment of children for the sins of their fathers is an example of a recursive function.
• Christ is the inverse function to the Adam function which outputs death because of the Fall. Actually it “is not truly an inverse function–it is more of a negation”.
• God is like an infinite dimensional vector space since there is nowhere to escape him or hide from him.
• On statistics and [population] sampling: “The evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah would have been spared if a sample of the population yields ten righteous men.”

More on this silliness from Good Math Bad Math. There’s something cathartic about composing something so silly — if you have a similar homily please share in the comments. My contribution: since you can’t count God’s blessings, not only is the amount of the blessings infinite but we know it is larger in cardinality than Aleph null.