The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - John Armstrong | The War on Science Interviews | Day 6

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel July 29thElizabeth Weiss July 30thSolveig Gold and Joshua Katz July 31stFrances Widdowson August 1stCarole Hooven August 2ndJanice Fiamengo August 3rdGeoff Horsman August 4thAlessandro Strumia August 5thRoger Cohen and Amy Wax August 6thPeter Boghossian August 7thLauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau August 8thAlex Byrne and Moti Gorin August 9thJudith Suissa and Alice Sullivan August 10thKarleen Gribble August 11thDorian Abbot August 12thThe topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the last. the book first appears with many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects. The authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Budry, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessandro Strumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau, Alex

Byrne and Modi Goren, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Gribble, and finally Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins. and will once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics, have been distorted,

and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology has permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Satel will talk about how social justice is hijacked medicine. And also, when it comes to issues of gender affirming care, we have a variety of authors who are going to speak about the issues there and how too often gender affirming care claims are made.

are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason, another, have been canceled for saying things. Francis Whittleson at Mount Royal University in Canada, and Carol Hoven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology,

will be talking to people who've looking at, at the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia, and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting, in many ways, scientific merit at those universities. And finally, Dorian Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science and politics and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence and where we go where the evidence is,

whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about and what in some sense this podcast is about. So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days and we've enjoyed bringing it to you. So with no further ado, the war on science, the interviews. Well, John Armstrong, thank you for joining us today,

joining me today to talk about your piece in the war in sign. Your piece entitled, How Do You Decolonize Mathematics? And in the War on Science, and I want to thank you for contributing the piece and for being here to talk to me about it today. Thanks a lot for coming. Pleasure. And now you may not be familiar with the Origins podcast, but what I like to do is to try and find a little bit about how you got to the point of writing the piece that you have written.

And then we'll talk about it and the contents of it, which is quite striking. And I know from having done a little research into you, of course, that you're, well, you've always been interested in math, at least in your academic career, BA and a PhD. But what got you interested in math in the first place? boringly it was just a really good teacher so with the benefit of hindsight I think I always kind of preferred physics and I think I've been subverted

by a brilliant math teacher away from my true passion but I'm stuck with it now so he was just really good and he you know there's this shift of quality with what he was introducing as to when I was about 13, something like that.

You just saw really interesting, beautiful maths, you know, the kind of, the kind of thing that makes people passionate. And I wasn't seeing that anywhere else in my academic life. So it was a bit of a no-brainer. Well, that's great. I mean, a good teacher at that impressionable age can have an amazing effect. And that's why I appreciate teachers so much. And even though he did take you over the dark side away from, well, I did it.

I did a one degree in math and one degree in. physics. So I, that obviously, you know, you actually answer that question. I always ask, why didn't you do physics to people? But anyway, but now did your parent, were your parents academic? No, not at all. Say my dad was a police. My mom's a social work essay. No, there of them. It's all academic. And they, and did they, they were fine with you doing math or being interested in math with becoming up? I mean, absolutely. They, they were incredibly encouraging to us. in, you know, in every way. So they sent us to quite posh school for Lancashire, which is where I'm from.

So not posh by British standards, really, but fairly, you know, and they really wanted the best for us. So, yeah, they were just thrilled that we were doing well academically. My dad wanted me to do well sportingly, but, you know, if that was not to be. So, well, that's, second best doing it, doing okay academically.

Well, that's, and then you, well, and you did pretty well, you went to Oxford and, and eventually, and did a PhD there,

but in fact, that's interest to me. So you, you were obviously interested in pure mathematics and you, and you worked in differential geometry, which is pretty darn close to physics. Yeah,

absolutely. I mean, I was doing general relativity-ish things. So, yeah, it's pretty, pretty physics. Yeah.

In fact, I have to say, my first exposure, to general relativity as a student was not in a physics class, but it was when I was doing my math degree as well. But what's interesting to me is then after that rather fundamental, or I was going to say esoteric area of mathematics, it's not that esoteric, but differential geometry which is pure mathematics.

You moved into the real world and into finance and into, I mean, rather significantly been involved in the executive, You were executive director of operations technology at Goldman Sachs and you started a company. What caused that move? I think it's basically the impossibility of having two people, both being academics, and leading a pleasant life. So, you know, my wife's a sociologist at UCL. She's also contributed as Alice Sullivan. and she and I, you know, we didn't want to sort of travel around the world doing different postdocs.

So I ended up getting a job, first of all, around Oxford and then moving to London. And it worked really well for us. Alice was able to pursue her academic interests, which are not enough to pay for her house in London, quite frankly. and you know there's plenty of interesting work to do in the city so that were really well oh okay and i didn't realize you had connection with alice okay that's interesting and and well that you know that's very sensible i i wondered whether sometimes i had a bunch of my phd students who went into finance mostly who did their ptg in physics mostly because it was there were no jobs in physics but also um it was also much more lucrative and attractive they moved down to

New York. But nevertheless, obviously, you maintain your interest in sort of academia. And it must have been, the transition back must have been intriguing me. So you were very successful, obviously, and in the applications of mathematics to both, well, obviously, finance a very interesting area of the real world where mathematics has been becoming increasingly important in a variety of ways. And in fact, we've even had podcasts about just that. But then you went back into academia at some point, which is an interesting transition.

And I'm wondering what caused that. Well, it's pretty straightforward, really. So we had this company that we were writing risk management software. We sold the company. I had to work out two years of, you know, the transition. And it was after that that I went to Goldman Sachs And although being at Goldman Sachs

It's one of these things that stands out And my CV is looking very good I absolutely hated at there So they have an interesting thing about them There's certainly at the time I think most new hires So most people who work at Goldman Sachs have worked there for their whole lives

And I've never seen the external world And they sort of realized When I was working then That they needed to get some ideas from outside So they were hiring in all these external hires. And most of them lasted less than 12 months because it's such a culture shock going to Golden Sacks. They've got a really strange way of working. So I lasted 18 months. So clearly I'm made of sturner stuff than the most people. But I realized then that I just, you know,

I'd really enjoyed having our own company. And I'd also enjoyed it when I was an academic. And I realized I basically had two ways to go either was to start up a new company. or go back into academia and I thought it was just, you know, it's the only opportunity I was going to have to try that out again. So really I did it for the intellectual freedom. That was what I wanted it for. So yeah, so it's easier probably to get back into financial maths than, I mean, that's why I did that rather than going back into differential geometries.

Even though I didn't have any papers in financial maths, I kind of felt it's probably easier to do that because there's this huge audience of students who want to learn about finance. So, yeah, that was the track that pursued. So basically I've had to completely reboot my academic year. So despite my venerable appearance, really, as a financial maths academic, I'm quite, quite genius still, really. Well, it's, no, but it's, it's, well, it's, it's also your experience made you.

I mean, it's nice to see university will take people who, who actually have real world experience, and that's very useful for students as well. So, and I think it's, you know, that's a great segue to the piece you wrote, how do you decolonize mathematics. You wouldn't, because you'd experienced pure mathematics, and of course mathematics as applies to real world,

in a very different culture, but the important thing was in those very different cultures, academia and in Golden Sachs and in your own business, the math was math. It was independent of the culture, which is really what we want to get to. And I think also the disappointment that you express here must, you know, you went back into academia because of the intellectual freedom and curiosity, inquiry, and then to be confronted

with what now is a more dogmatic world must have motivated you to write this. And it's telling because you approach it in a very inquisitive way. You know, why is this the case? So you point out at the beginning, of course, as a number of people have, that, that, following George Floyd's murder, a number of things happen. And you quote a nature editorial, which is really amazing in New 2020, and I'll read this part. He said, we recognize that nature is one of the white institutions that are responsible for bias and research and scholarship. The enterprise of science has been and remains complicit in systemic racism, and it must drive harder to correct these injustice and apply marginalized voices. A remarkable statement,

none of which has any support in reality. And it's like we recognize that this is the case in spite of the fact that there's no evidence, or they present no evidence that's the case, which is so typical of this anti-scientific approach to things. And then based on that, they then in a guest editorial say sometime later, it is so important for science, curricular research and academic spaces to go through, a decolonization process. And these are not political or ideological acts. In fact, that's exactly what they are.

But part of science themselves, an example of science of self-correcting misdickism in the pursuit of truth. And indeed, science self-corrects, but related to science, not politics or ideology. So you see this, it must have shocked you to read that. And it, um, uh, I mean, what was your reaction when you first saw that? Well, I mean, in fact, I saw that, by the time I saw those particular quotes, I guess I was expecting it.

So the first thing that I read on it was actually by the Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education. So that's a UK quango. and they were saying similar things, but in a sense, in something more sinister, because they were writing a document, which is called the subject benchmark statement for mathematics stats and operation research,

but essentially what it does is it defines the curriculum for mathematics degrees in the UK. And that said that they sent out a draft for consultation. it sends amongst other things that mathematics should be taught from a decolonial viewpoint. And so that was really what got me started in this. So I then sort of had a look at how the idea of decolonisation was being described in many different places, which is what then led me to things like the Nature article. And the Nature article is very typical of what people mean by decolonising maths.

it's typical because some of the quotes that you highlight they say things like I can't remember it. I think they talk about things like ways of knowing and different. You know, what it turns out that decolonisation is about is about competing scientific ways of understanding with, I don't know, sort of politicised opinions. I want to work through what you were, because what is the meaning is, of course, you point out that even the nature, later in a nature article, they say, hey, one common argument is that decolonization is irrelevant to the practice of mathematics, a solution to quadrat equation, doesn't after all depend on mathematicians' identity or protected characteristics. And you think that would be enough to end it. But of course, and they say, yeah, in spite of that reality, here is what we think. And as you point out, it's not clear. what it would even mean to decolonized mathematics when that's the true statement.

And what amazed me is, unlike most of us who would then just dismiss this as absolute nonsense, which it is, you took a much more open-minded approach to try and understand specifically what the literature said. But before that, you did get involved in this, in this an open letter opposing what you just talked about, the UK's Quality Assurance Associate. it. And you observe, as you say, you observe the theory of decoloniality. I don't even know how to say it. It's a postmodern critique of the European paradigm of rational knowledge, of rational knowledge. And the history of mathematics shows it to be far from European, which is true, and we'll get there. It's true that mathematics was developed all over the world. But in some sense, that's also

irrelevant because the whole point is it as as we'll talk about later and as you stress and one should stress is it it is it the history of mathematics is interesting but it's also irrelevant to the mathematics it you know it came from all over the world from India from from the Arab countries all over the world but it doesn't matter because it is what it is and that's the key point so it is true that it's not a Western that there's no reason to decolonize it in the first place because it's it has its origins in many areas but beyond that it isn't as we'll point out it isn't western in any sense but sorry go on well it's interesting when it's so obvious to me that you know you're informed about what decolonization means yeah and the reality

is that most of my colleagues have absolutely no idea what decolonization means and when I'm when they put forward this proposal and I organised an open letter against it, I wanted to get my colleagues on board. And it was really obvious when I spoke to them that many of them just didn't know the first thing about the theory of decolonisation. And in particular, one colleague who I really respect a guy called Samir Murphy is a physicist, so I'm sure you'll respect him as well. when I told him that that quote that you highlighted

from Chihano about the European paradigm of rational knowledge he thought I was basically exaggerating you know he thought that I was hyping up like I was a right wing tabloid pretending that there's a bigger problem than there is because it's crazy

nobody believes that maths exists to oppress others and you know it's just obvious nonsense and so that was that was what drove me to look at it in the scholarly way, because I wanted to show, well, it's true. You know, it really does come from this postmodern theory of decoloniality. So, you know, Kehano is not a minor figure. He's got 10,000 citations, according to Google Scholar.

And his theory is pretty straightforwardly that knowledge, as understood by scientists, empirical, rational knowledge, is, in some sense, to be racist and designed to oppress. And so I really just wanted to put together something that would be scholarly and give an accurate idea of just how influential those kinds of ideas were in the program of decolonizing maths. And so that was what motivated me to do it. Well, it's great. I mean, I applaud that motivation because I would not be able to give enough credence to even, you know, it's wonderful. He did a serious look and what these things are about. And I want to walk through this.

And as you point out, you looked at 37 papers, which are key papers arguing for decolonization of math. And many of them, eight of them, referred to this Keanu. And let me read the quote that you gave from this. This is a quote. He takes a European knowledge directly, not mathematics, but saying the colonizers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning.

At first they placed these patterns far out of reach of the dominated. Later they taught them in a partial and selective way. In order to co-op some of the dominated into their own power institutions. Then European culture was made seductive. It gave access to power. Cultural Europeanization was transformed into an aspiration. The idea that, again, the knowledge itself is subjective. And it's a power struggle, which is such a central part of postmodernism, that everything is power.

Everything is power, victims and the oppressed and the oppressors, and nothing could be understood except in terms of that. That's a very Marxian view as well. But that independent of the actual knowledge itself or the actual subject matter, as if the subject matter has no objective reality, that there's no objective reality. So you're right. I mean, you know, that's key. But you also point out that there's another characteristic that, as you went through it,

and another highly cited author was Dambrosio, who introduced. the concept of ethnomathematics. You want to talk about that a little bit? So the, I find ethnomathematics a little bit confused. Because sometimes it seems to, I think the idea is that there's lots of mathematics out there that we're somehow blinded to

because of our Western preconceptions about what constitutes mathematics. and it's unclear whether they believe that mathematics is universal or not. You know, I can find quotes throughout the literature, some saying, yes, it is universal. There is universal truth. I'm saying there isn't. But ethnomathematics tends to look at aspects of indigenous culture and find mathematics there. And frankly, I, on the whole, find it really unsatisfying.

And, you know, there's one example I saw recently of somebody talking about smoke signals and the fact that you get two spiraling helices in a smoke signal. And they said that's an example of mathematics. Well, to me, it's not an example of mathematics. And it's an example of something one could model with mathematics. And if there was evidence of indigenous people modeling that with mathematics, that would be interesting. But it really is nothing.

It's just something that could have been modeled. another example that crocks up there's nothing in the indigenous literature or customs where they talk about the helical structure of smoke signals as a central part of their culture. Not as far as I'm aware. I mean, a stronger perhaps example as well is this, there's one one of the better pieces of the literature I found

was looking at teaching about Bessier curves. So these are curves that you can use in drawing programs that give you a nice smooth curves. And they were saying you could teach those by discussing about Anishinaabe boat building. And the idea there was that they build their boats out of a sort of structure a bit like plywood or something as the initial frame.

They built their boat on top of that. And that clearly reminded the people who wrote this paper of the work of Bezier, who invented Bezier curves, who replaced the modeling that was done for building planes, where they'd build plywood frameworks and used. this to model planes and then they replaced it with computer modeling and which became possible through his Bezio splines. The interesting thing to me is that Bezio was modeling and Bezio was doing mathematics and the Anishinaabe, you know, I'm sure they produced absolutely wonderful boats.

I'm sure they're very beautiful boats and the construction they produced is very interesting and it shows that they're a very skilled and intelligent and probably very rational people. It's a bit disappointing that that example, as far as I know, they weren't modeling even. You know, if they're built small boats in order to, as a template for a larger boat, I think you could argue that would be ethnomathematics. But unfortunately, that example isn't there. I suspect there is good ethnomathematics out there, but people, it's very difficult to identify in cultures that don't leave any written documents behind.

Exactly. And, you know, the interesting thing is you quote him, he asked his quote, this is, quote, amazes me. He says, quote, believe. the University of Mathematics is becoming hard to sustain in the face of anthropological research, which is such an amazing quote because it's the exact opposite. You would think that if different cultures discovered mathematics, it's a demonstration of the universality of mathematics that Bezier-Curz-are useful in building boats, independent of who build them. I mean, it's the exact

opposite conclusion based on anthropological research. So the ability to delude oneself in that way is so extreme in that quote that amazed me. Now, another person you, the quote, is saying, highly cited was Bishop, who wrote a paper called, this is, the name itself has just says so much. Western mathematics, the secret weapon of cultural imperialism. Now, we can talk about that in a second, but whenever I see Western mathematics, it reminds me, I mean, the point is there is no Western mathematics. There's mathematics. I remember going once speaking in China at a conference and someone was talking about Eastern medicine. And I objected to the notion or Chinese medicine. There's no such thing as Chinese medicine. There's no such thing as Western

medicine. There's medicine. It reminds me of a line by a friend and a wonderful musician, a writer Tim Minchin, who gave me a song and talked once about, you know, you know what they call medicine, you know, alternative medicine that works? Medicine. And that's the point. It's, there is, you know, we all have the same DNA and ATP. And medicine is medicine. It applies to human beings. And we all have universal biology.

And to late categorize something by who developed it is so irrelevant to whether it works, that to label it that way is demeans it. And to label mathematics as Western in some sense, it's ridiculous. And, and, and. My favorite example of ethnomathematics, I think the greatest ethnomathematician of all time, was Fibonacci. Yes. Because Fibonacci thought, well, maybe we can learn something from other cultures. He went and had a look at Islamic mathematics.

And he brought back to us, you know, the number system that we used today, he brought back to us algebra. And the fact is, if there's good quality mathematics, then that's, people have a voracious appetite. mathematics has spread internationally because it isn't western, it isn't east. It's powerful truth. And this is why mathematics has spread in the way that it has. It basically headed east, came back west again, headed east all over the world now. If anybody was to find a piece of brand new mathematics that had been created by an indigenous culture, that would be hugely exciting. And this is the huge disappointment of ethnic mathematics,

but as far as I know, it's produced zero new mathematics. And that's, you know, it's not a successful program. Yeah, and, you know, and in fact, it's also demeaning. It's in me, Bishop, you quote Bishop, it's saying that Western mathematics can be distinguished from other forms by its values of, quote, rationality, abstraction, power, control, and progress. He argues of promoting these values. It promote Western cultural hegemony.

It is demeaning. It suggests that rationality and abstraction and power are Western concepts and that irrational, that other cultures are irrational. And so it, it, I mean, I find it a huge insult to the West because we're tremendously irrational. We've had a proud, long history of irrationality. We've come up with some of the absurdist ideas, some of the daftest religions. You know, nobody talks about terrible alternative leeches and things in Western medicine. So irrationality is something that the West is absolutely brilliant.

And we're improving it, I think, day by day. So you're right. The West is rational. But to argue somehow that the non-West is irrational is demeaning to them. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's such a tisemongous insult. And that's a point you make.

I mean, you made in your original letter and you're making this piece is that one obvious problem is that math didn't originate in Europe. And you want to, you know, I mean, you can describe, you know, for the concept of zero and on, maybe you want to talk, other than Fibonacci, you want to talk about that a little bit? Well,

the one example I think that is just breathtaking is the example of Madhava. So this isn't a well-known story even amongst mathematicians, but there's a formula for pi that is usually attributed to Leibnitz. So you take one minus a third, plus a fifth,

minus a seventh, plus a ninth, minus an 11th, and so on. And if you add that up, add infinitum, you get pi over four. And so that's Leidenitz's formula for pi. And about 200 years earlier, in Kerala, Medhava discovered that formula. And there are attempts, there are people who have attempted to try and say that maybe Medhava's knowledge was somehow transferred across to the West.

and that Leibniz was copying in without crediting it. But I don't think there's any serious evidence for that. It's a sort of just about theoretical possibility. What it shows is A, that maths is universal, B, that math is not held socially constructed. And it also shows just the incredible genius that was in India at the time. I mean, Mdhava is a breathtakingly good. mathematician.

The, you know, it's the real mystery is how that powerful knowledge wasn't used more effectively. It's that, that to me is interesting. How did it die out in India? It's very interesting. Anyway, 200 years later, it comes back to, it comes back to Europe. And a guy called Gregory actually was the first European to know Leibniz's formula for pie.

and so he found it two years before Leidenets, but he thought that incorrectly that Newton had already discovered Power Series, so he didn't publish, and so Leidniz. Leidniz is the one with the credit. So, you know, we probably should be calling it the Medhaava Gregory Leidniz formula. And, yeah, again, that's interesting, because it illustrates a lot of people get very wound up

that lots of mass serums are incorrectly attributed. But in fact, it's universal. I had never heard of Madhava until I started looking into decolonising maths. It's interesting because we didn't know about him in the West when the theories were discovered. He was found out about in the 19th century by, I can't remember the name of the academic who discovered him. But unfortunately, his paper was a failure. We can all appreciate that. It's an incredible paper telling us about these wonderful Carolyn scholars died without trace.

And it wasn't until, I think about the 1950s. that it began to be known. It didn't even make it into history of math textbooks until the 21st century. So this is why most mathematicians have never heard of Mada. Go on. I mean, it is true that mathematicians are pretty bad at knowing the history of that subject,

and we've done a pretty poor job of keeping track of it. It's probably because we're obsessed with our subject. People kind of lose interest in it. in the stories. We know very little about any of our famous mathematicians. I was asking my colleagues about Euler, who is one of the most famous mathematicians in history. And 50% of them didn't know, this is a straw poll in our staff room, not scientific, but 50% didn't know that Oiler was blind in his last year. I mean, to me, that's an incredible part of Oiler's life, that he was producing much better papers

and I will ever produce at a rate of knots while totally blind. And mathematicians care about the ideas. They don't really care about the personalities. But that's because they don't have to because the personalities are irrelevant to the mathematics. And I was going to say, you're right,

it's true that it was misattributed, but most students who learn the formula however for, you know, one minus one third place, who know that. don't care and don't even know who Leibniz is. I mean, and then and they would, and it goes in their head and out of it. If they, if it's a name, they'd remember it for an exam, maybe, but no one's, no mathematician

will generally ask even for the name and they'll ask you to, you know, try and reproduce the proof or something. And, and I think that's really what's important to recognize there is that, yeah, math is, the history of math is interesting, the history of physics is interesting, but you don't have to know either to do the math or the physics. In fact, if you're Richard Feynman, you can reproduce physics without ever reading a book. And that's what's wonderful about physics is that it doesn't matter. The history is irrelevant.

When I tell my colleagues about Medhaava, because most of them have never heard of him, their reaction is, how did he prove it? Yeah. That's what they want to know. Yeah, exactly. And then the next thing, you know, this leads into the next thing that somehow teach you, mathematics might be opposed with Western worldview. It's not a Western world view. It's a worldview of the modern world we live in. The modern world which is based on mathematics, which you and I having

this conversation across an ocean is only possible because of applications of mathematics. So it is true that a worldview was very different. And when people talk about indigenous culture and indigenous worldviews, you're right. That's different. But it's not a Western worldview. It's a world we live in today and to deny that it is fundamentally based, you know, whether it came from the west or the east, the mathematics is the basis of modern technology. And to say that that's bad, is to deny these, or unreal, is to deny the existence of the world in which we live in. Yeah, I mean, another thread in what decolonizing maths means to people. Some people say it as this math is socially constructive. But another point of view is that we should,

should teach maths to rebel against Western cultural hegemony. And there people have really encouraged, they try and get people to develop indigenous understandings and so forth. And there was a really nice example of an app that somebody produced where they were able to use, I can't remember precisely how it was some sort of beading app or something like that. Anyway, all the students who used it, they started doing things like creating images of Barbie dolls

using these ethnic feeding systems because they wanted to live in the modern world, they wanted to use their understanding to participate in the modern world, despite the best efforts of their teachers to try and pigeonhole them within certain cultural traditions. They wanted to participate in the world. and other students were, you know, using their mathematical understanding quite spontaneously for very capitalistic ends. And, you know, it's neither Western or not, nor not.

There are some people in the West who don't want to be capitalists, and there are plenty of people around the world who do. It's, you know, for me, is let students cheers themselves how they want to use mathematics and what they want to do with their understanding. and I don't want to force anything on them. That's wonderful there. Well, that's exactly their ideas. You don't want to tell people what to think but how to think, which is really the purpose of this. And you point out another aspect of this is exactly what you've just talked about,

something called critical math education, which is like critical social theory, which sounds like its theory, but all it is is critical. It's not critical in the ordinary sense of the world. It criticizes. It's not critical in the, sense critical thinking. It's critical in the sense that the whole purpose is to criticize. And you

give this example, you know, of someone who's named Frankenstein appropriately, who suggests teaching division by getting students to show that, quote, each of the research 160,000 taxpayers got nine times more money at the maximum grant as the maximum grant for a family for. So the whole idea is to, in fact, impose politics. It's critically, it's, it's, it's, it's, critical of society and saying, I don't like the society in which we live. And let's impose that on mathematics. So it's the exact opposite of what really is critical, which is to ask what the ideas are all about and to think about them. This is to say, we don't like politics. And we want to impose that dogma on everything. So it's acritical in the true scientific sense. And it is

exactly what you don't want to do or what should be the anathema to all scholars. shift you, which is not to impose your dogmatic views on the ideas that you're going to explore. And this is the clear. So critical pedagogy in general, it comes from this guy, Palo Friere. And it actually is such a radical worldview. It takes the view that the purpose of education is to bring about social change. Exactly. And for me, the purpose of education is to educate yourself for personal growth and personal,

personal understanding. If you want to use that for social change, so be it. If you want to use it for conservatism, so be it. I just want to give my students the tools to understand the world. And it's actually critical pedagogy that really alarms me because that's actually having real traction in our institutions. So for example, at Kings, we introduced a module called the King's first year. The plan was to make it compulsory for all students. Fortunately, it was canned. It is no more. But, you know, that course was teaching a lot of this kind of stuff, just as fact, just teaching a postmodern view of the world, teaching people to interpret the world entirely through power and through subjectivity, and without any critiques of that. And that's got real traction.

And another thing that's got real traction is the education for sustainable development, which again is founded in critical pedagogy. And that's still at the moment, though, we're still planning at Kings to insist that every student must learn about environmentalism at some point during their course, even if they want to study music. I mean, this is a genuine thing from the UN. They suggested that students studying music should be encouraged to write songs about water shortages. I mean, I do not want to ever hear one of those songs.

People should be able to choose, you know, if you're studying math, math is an abstract subject, theoretical physics. You can't, yes, there may be applications in environmentalism, but we should be able to develop our minds and pursue different interests. And the idea that every student in a university should be pursuing the same ideology for social change really alarms me. and that actually is my biggest concern in all of this. I think people can understand that decolonising maths is a stupid idea.

You know, most people see it as comic. The tabloids in the UK, when they talk about decolonising maths, they can just see right through it and how foolish it is. I think it's harder for people to see something like teaching education for sustainable development. People see the dangers of that less clearly. But I think they're exactly the same. this risk of indoctrination and this risk of not giving people intellectual freedom. It's easy to be sympathetic to the idea of environmentalism, but the point is when you,

and this is central to many of the articles, the book and what people are talking about, ultimately, yes, it's okay to be sympathetic to these ideas, but if you impose them on the disciplines, then what you're doing is imposing a political belief on a subject. And it's easy to say, oh, I like that political beliefs. I'm happy to impose that. But what if someone imposed a different belief, then you wouldn't like it? And the whole point is that those separate political ideas have no place in that area, unless you're talking about the history of politics or unless you're willing to have a critical discussion of ideas.

But to impose the political police inevitably, people are very amenable to those things. The same with the names of diversity, equity, inclusion. It sounds nice. Oh, we want this, we want that. Until you impose certain ideas, political ideas. And ultimately, you realize that, as you say, scholarship and education should not, the purpose is not social justice. The purpose is to create people who can think.

And the hope is that people who can think critically will ultimately lead to a better society. But the idea is to teach people about to think critically, not to tell them what is a better society. That's not the purpose of education. I mean, a great example comes from, I think her name is Marilyn Frankenstein. So another of her lesson plans that she gives gets people to look at the size of the subsidy in the US for nuclear power. And so she was giving, this was back in the 90s, I think, she was giving anti-nuclear power lessons, which she was obviously completely confident that she was right, that we shouldn't have nuclear power. We now look at France.

which is bucking the international trend with lowering carbon emissions with growing GDP because they have nuclear power. And the dogmatic view of these educators is closing their minds, it's closing therefore the minds of students.

They may actually be shooting themselves in the forest. I mean, personally, I think if you care about environmentalism, you've got to see nuclear power as part of the equation. And this sort of juvenile sloganeering view of politics and science. It just doesn't help anyone whatsoever. Yeah. And you point at the well-meaning people have this.

And this is, it's again, well-meaning, they feel somehow guilty because of past racism. And they say, oh, I've come to realize my own contributions are this. So it's almost spiritual. If you haven't imposed politics, then you're imposing some kind of almost sort of, almost religious view of how you think the world should be. And again, there's no place for that in math.

And I think, you know, in the last, at the end of your piece, you point out something, you know, central theorems such as the fundamental theorems of algebra and calculus don't have any names associated with them all. And there's a reason for that because, you know, those are ideas that are independent of that. And to say that, it's so weird because you would think it shouldn't need to be said. It should be obvious. And you point out the public realize that it's obvious. One in one is two is not a cultural statement. And most people recognize that.

And it's amazing that in the 21st century, we have to even have this discussion. I was at a meeting on decolonizing maths at the London Mathematical Society. And somebody stood up and said, does two plus two equal four? Well, that's something we should question because there are different ways of knowing.

They said that in the London Mathematical Society. Wow. Not a murmur. Everyone went, well, you're fine. In fact, a previous speaker had said one plus one equals two, nobody's denying that. And nobody said anything to him. She didn't shout at him down. But genuinely, it's got to the level of craziness where people have questioned things like that.

She wasn't a mathematician. So she's just been steeped in postmodern nonsense. And she has got to a point where she believes it might not actually be true that two plus two equals four. That's the point when people sort of feel so. because of some sense of guilt or what's good or what's bad, as I say, almost a pseudo-religious belief. You convince yourself of something that is obviously not true. The public realizes it's not true. And you found out, moreover, that even as a level of scholarship,

you found that none of the papers who talked about the colonization actually addressed the question of why or whether it's problematic. And so ultimately, I mean, the discussion, as I say, shouldn't even need to be had. But you stayed in the end of your, I'll give you the last word, when you say decolonizing mathematics is the reductio ad absurdum of the decolonization program itself. And if it's absurd, maybe one should explain the program itself. But within the wider university, indoctrination and postmodern thought is increasingly the norm. As mathematicians and scientists, we have a duty to all students at our institution. And we should not allow the spread of indoctrination and science denial, as you just discussed,

to go on challenged. And I'm really happy that you've been challenging it, and I'm really happy you wrote this piece about mathematics and, you know, to discuss things that one would think would do not even need to be discussed. And as part of a, and that's part of the purpose of the book, is to point out the problems that are going on and our need for education and science and scholarship more generally to speak out. And the only way to do it is if we internally speak out, But it's easy for people to criticize it from outside and be viewed as right wing or not right wing. But one of the purposes is to get people from a wide variety of disciplines to point out the internal problems so we can try and change them. And internally, and in the United States, there's a lot of external efforts to try and do things, which I tend to disagree with.

But we need people like you and others to speak out. And hopefully, by our speaking out, we can get other academics to speak out and turn scholarships. into what it should be, which is the free and unvettered inquiry into trying, learning about how the world works, with the hope that ultimately that allows us to make the world a better place, but most important, to learn how the world works to discover and disseminate knowledge. So thank you very much for your discussion today and for your piece in the book. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lawrence. It's been a pleasure talking about things that don't need to be discussed with you. It's been excellent. Thank you.

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