![]() The reason for this fact is what is at stake. ![]() 1 Anachronistic as these references may seem to the eyes of the modern scholar, and notwithstanding the deep differences between the worldviews of ancients and moderns, there remains the fact that Euclid’s division algorithm survives a variety of translations from bad to excellent. Thus it is that a contemporary introduction to the Theory of Numbers invokes the “sophisticated means” employed by Babylonian clerks to generate Pythagorean triples, uses the “Chinese remainder theorem” in proofs, and places Euclid’s “division algorithm” as the foundation stone of the whole subject. Are we not, in so doing, committing another act of charitable translation, by redressing other people’s acts and assertions so as to make them look better in our modern garb? And, granted that there is, so to speak, mathematics in the forest, is it the same as Western mathematics, and can it be translated without distorting the peculiarities of indigenous ontologies in which it is embedded?Įthnographies as well as histories of mathematics that deal with different cultures suggest strongly that we can actually engage in meaningful conversations with people in other cultures, in the sense of talking significantly to each other, and not merely just misunderstanding each other. This argument, of course, begs the point, which is precisely whether or not there is mathematics among nonliterate, indigenous cultures in the first place-that is to say, whether we are talking about the same thing when we include finger-counting among indigenous societies and theorem-proving in axiomatic style as comparable instances of mathematics. ![]() ![]() Is it possible to translate forest mathematics into modern language? The immediate answer is yes, because otherwise there could be no ethnography-not to mention history-of mathematics, a bleak conclusion that would deprive of meaning many works on counting systems among illiterate people and on their worldviews. ![]()
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