I have long been intrigued by the history of mathematics. Why did it take so long to invent the concept of zero? Just what was Hilbert trying to do, anyway? Thus, when I came across a book entitled “The Secret Lives of Numbers: A hidden history of math’s unsung trailblazers”, I fell into the trap. Closer scrutiny would have revealed a publication date of 2023 and a female author – both warning signs.
The principal author was Kate Kitigawa, who had taught history at Harvard – not so much of a recommendation now that we are in the age of DIE. Part way through writing, she instead moved to the Japanese space agency, which may account for the some of the book’s disjointedness. She had a soy-boy co-author who seems to have limited his contributions to correcting her grammar.
Surprise! The “unsung trailblazers” turn out to be mostly female, or at least males who lacked pallor. Sometimes they are purely hypothetical – like the (implicitly black) woman who may have scratched tally marks on a baboon’s bone about 20,000 years ago in what is now Uganda. The marks are intriguing, adding up to the sexagesimal 60 we still use for seconds & minutes. Even more intriguingly, the 60 marks are split into groups of prime numbers (11, 13, 17, 19). What could this mean? Ms. Kitigawa approvingly quotes a female mathematician who proposed the marks were a woman tracking her rather odd menstrual cycle. Modern feminists cannot seem to grasp the idea that 20,000 years ago our female human ancestors were probably almost continuously pregnant between puberty and early death – menstrual cycles were not much of an issue for females back then.
We also learn that ancient Chinese mathematicians kinda sorta almost invented calculus centuries before Leibniz and Newton – emphasis on the kinda sorta almost. Moving to more recent times, we learn such things as the famous 16th Century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had a sister Sophia. She may have helped Brahe by noting down some of his astronomical measurements, if we want to call that kind of assistance “trailblazing”.
However, there have been genuine significant female mathematicians, particularly in the 19th and 20th Centuries … women such as Sophie Kowalevski and Emmy Noether. Ms. Kitigawa glides over the issue that these female “trailblazers” were not only Women of Pallor, they were also often privileged Women of Pallor. Plus, they all seem to have had great support & encouragement from male mathematicians, which hardly fits the feminist notion of the evil Patriarchy trying to keep women pregnant & barefoot in the kitchen.
These female mathematicians undoubtedly had to struggle in life, as presumably did most of their male peers. Ms. Kitigawa hardly noticed that Emmy Noether’s main challenge in 1930s Germany was not that she was female – it was that she was Jewish. Because she was female, she was given a safe position in an all-female US university far from Nazi Germany; some of her male colleagues were not so fortunate.
Perhaps the most stunning observation from a feminist writing about math’s hidden history is what she completely failed to mention: without a certain irreplaceable contribution from women, there would be no mathematics at all! Pythagoras had a mother, as did Euclid and Euler and Newton and Einstein. But that essential contribution to mathematics from women over the ages is beneath the notice of a modern feminist.