The Gender of Math

The politics of math are of newfound concern today, due to the outsize influence of algorithms and code in contemporary life. While only a few years ago, tech authors were still hawking Silicon Valley as the great hope for humanity, today one is more likely to hear how Big Tech increases social inequality, how algorithms are racist, and how math is a weapon. Do algorithms discriminate along gendered lines? Do mathematical systems harbor an essential bias? This essay shows that mathematics has long been defined through an elemental gendering, that within such typing there exists a prohibition on mixing the types, and that the two core types themselves (geometry and arithmetic) are mutually intertwined using notions of hierarchy, foreignness, and priority. The author concludes that whatever incidental biases it may display, mathematics also contains an essential bias.

ETHNOMATHEMATICS

In mathematics education ethnomathematics is the study of the relationship between mathematics and culture. Often associated with cultures without written expression, it may also be defined as the mathematics which is practiced among identifiable cultural groups. It refers to a broad cluster of ideas ranging from distinct numerical and mathematical systems to multicultural mathematics education. The goal of ethnomathematics is to contribute both to the understanding of culture and the understanding of mathematics, and mainly to lead to an appreciation of the connections between the two.

Book Review: The Cult of Pythagoras

We review ``"The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths" by Alberto A. Martinez, 2012. The book sets out a number of mathematical myths and dissolves them by a combination of checking historical sources and calculating results using the mathematics of the time. We pay particular attention to a chapter on division by zero. We record the earliest dates for particular solutions to the problem of division by zero and the ambition to have total mathematical systems.

Local Mathematics and No Information at a Distance; Some Effects on Physics and Geometry

Local mathematics consists of a collection of mathematical systems located at each space and time point. The collection is limited to the systems that include numbers in their axiomatic description. A scalar map between systems at different locations is based on the distinction of two conflated concepts, number and number value. The effect that this setup has on theory descriptions of physical and geometric systems is described. This includes a scalar spin 0 field in gauge theories, expectation values in quantum mechanics and path lengths in geometry. The possible relation of the scalar map to consciousness is noted.

Local Mathematics and No Information at a Distance; Some Effects on Physics and Geometry

Local mathematics consists of a collection of mathematical systems located at each space and time point. The collection is limited to the systems that include numbers in their axiomatic description. A scalar map between systems at different locations is based on the distinction of two conflated concepts, number and number value. The effect that this setup has on theory descriptions of physical and geometric systems is described. This includes a scalar spin 0 field in gauge theories, expectation values in quantum mechanics and path lengths in geometry. The possible relation of the scalar map to consciousness is noted.

A Sequence of Models of Generalized Second-order Dedekind Theory of Real Numbers with Increasing Powers

The paper is devoted to construction of some closed inductive sequence of models of the generalized second-order Dedekind theory of real numbers with exponentially increasing powers. These models are not isomorphic whereas all models of the standard second-order Dedekind theory are. The main idea in passing to generalized models is to consider instead of superstructures with the single common set-theoretical equality and the single common set-theoretical belonging superstructures with several generalized equalities and several generalized belongings for rst and second orders. The basic tools for the presented construction are the infraproduct of collection of mathematical systems different from the factorized Los ultraproduct and the corresponding generalized infrafiltration theorem. As its auxiliary corollary we obtain the generalized compactness theorem for the generalized second-order language.

Mathematical Models for Computer Virus

Computer viruses have been studied for a long time both by the research and by the application communities. As computer networks and the internet became more popular from the late 1980s on, viruses quickly evolved to be able to spread through the internet by various means such as file downloading, email, exploiting security holes in software, etc. In general, epidemic models assume that individuals go through a series of states at a certain constant set of rates. Different epidemic models have been proposed based on the characteristics of the systems and the topology of the network. In this chapter, an analysis of various epidemic models will be analyzed under differential mathematical systems.

Paramateriality: Novel Biodigital Manifolds

In this chapter Marcos Cruz suggests a new way of biointegrated design which explores non-building, unthinkable novel materials that are products of in-vivo research on living organisms and forms that are physically built and yield new aesthetics, resulting from novel hybrid techniques of production. Nonhuman creativity comes from this new aesthetics and from the in-vitro mathematical systems and material computation that run parallel. Not only a new aesthetics is put forward, but also a new way of dealing with environmental issues, critical to future living. The chapter dwells on the shift from the performance of materials to their performativity, as a way of explaining the interactivity between materials and their broader ecology. Moreover, through his work as teacher and as practising architect, the author illustrates how nature itself is potentially programmable matter.