In the USA, the decolonization of mathematics, which the “Woke” brigade has labeled as Eurocentric, racist and supremacist, has long been a contentious issue. Pedagogical reforms are gaining ground in schools there, lowering the level of math classes in the name of equality because immigrant students have a harder time with algebra and geometry. In addition, concepts such as the Pythagorean theorem and pi gave the impression that mathematics was largely developed by Europeans.
As John Armstrong, a lecturer at London’s King’s College, recently explained in The Spectator, mathematics is an “amazingly international occupation”: the numbers we use were inspired by Chinese mathematicians, written down in India, by Persian and Arabic mathematicians popularized and introduced to Europe by the Moorish occupation of southern Spain. “Granted that the Moorish occupation was a form of colonialism,” Armstrong quipped, “but apparently not the form of colonialism we should be interested in.”
