Maybe calculus can be taught better, but this article has a political agenda:
"However, the issue is not merely correction of history: the adoption of the decolonised calculus involves overturning deep-seated racist and colonial prejudices. These prejudices are not even easily recognizable as racist since they involve a false history and a bad philosophy of mathematics which was used to assert racist, colonial, and Western civilizational and intellectual superiority. Specifically, racism was bolstered by the belief that Whites/West invented a “superior” kind of mathematics."
I am a bit confused by the claims of theft of the calculus in this article. I also don't really follow any of the thoughts on how the Newton could not have used the calculus because he did not know about the real numbers, or how the Indian calculus was based on polynomials. If anyone could enlighten me more, I would be very glad.
The author has an axe to grind. There is a lot argumentation by assertion going on. Here’s a part that makes it hard to take this post seriously.
How did Newton and Leibniz discover the calculus without understanding it? Because Europeans stole the calculus from India, in connection with their navigational problem, and didn’t acknowledge the theft. Does that make a difference to teaching calculus? Yes, because knowledge thieves often fail to understand what they steal.
It is certainly the case that calculus is well understood these days and no one alive was involved in the “theft” of calculus. Calculus is quite intuitive and the concepts are not hard to understand. For the most part things work the way one expects and so a great deal could be accomplished working intuitively. However, in the 1800s pathological examples were discovered and the need to put the subject on a firm footing arose.
What is telling in the post is the lack of examples. I haven’t read the whole post so I could be wrong but the author sounds like a crank.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 20.5 ms ] thread"However, the issue is not merely correction of history: the adoption of the decolonised calculus involves overturning deep-seated racist and colonial prejudices. These prejudices are not even easily recognizable as racist since they involve a false history and a bad philosophy of mathematics which was used to assert racist, colonial, and Western civilizational and intellectual superiority. Specifically, racism was bolstered by the belief that Whites/West invented a “superior” kind of mathematics."
How did Newton and Leibniz discover the calculus without understanding it? Because Europeans stole the calculus from India, in connection with their navigational problem, and didn’t acknowledge the theft. Does that make a difference to teaching calculus? Yes, because knowledge thieves often fail to understand what they steal.
It is certainly the case that calculus is well understood these days and no one alive was involved in the “theft” of calculus. Calculus is quite intuitive and the concepts are not hard to understand. For the most part things work the way one expects and so a great deal could be accomplished working intuitively. However, in the 1800s pathological examples were discovered and the need to put the subject on a firm footing arose.
What is telling in the post is the lack of examples. I haven’t read the whole post so I could be wrong but the author sounds like a crank.