Please read part 1 of this blog post first. Plagiarism, or the theft of knowledge, whether of the calculus, or of the calculus transmission thesis, has ill effects on mathematics education. This is not just about cheating in exams. When cheaters turn teachers it will naturally create a problem for…
After my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the nature of mathematical proof and the transmission of calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c. CE (Pearson Longman, 2007) it is well known today that calculus developed in India a thousand years before Newton and Leibniz. Cochin based Jesuits stole…
At my IIT (BHU) lecture (see also previous post), I emphasized Bertrand Russell’s remark that there is neither meaning nor truth in (formal) mathematics. Hence, any nonsense proposition one desires (such as “All rabbits have two horns”) can be proved as a formal mathematical theorem from appropriate postulates: Russell’s sole…
Will be giving the institute lecture at IIT (BHU), the century old first engineering college in India, on the 18th of Jan, followed by a workshop on “Alternative math” on 19th of Jan. (The Workshop is from 10 am to 5 pm with tea breaks and a lunch break.) Core…
Was honored before a mass audience at Bijapur. The award was conferred by Karnataka MP Shri Basavraj Patil, and the Vice Chancellor of the Central University Karnataka. Kalaburagi, Prof. H. M. Maheshwaraiah. Below is a picture of the audience. For more honors earlier this year see http://ckraju.net/blog/?p=150.
A conference on decolonisation of humanities was organized at Al Maaref University, Beirut. The big concern was how colonial education has altered human values. But Western education did not come for humanities, therefore my point was that merely changing humanities education won’t result in the desired change. The facts are…
A reporter from Africa met me recently in India to find out about the events concerning the panel discussion on decolonisation in Cape Town, a year ago. Someone here asked: could he be a church agent, who may again present a biased picture? I don’t know. But he does not…
Yesterday (26 November, Constitution Day) at Constitution club, I received the Nilakantha honor from the Dalit organization “Kabir ke log” from a former Union deputy education minister (and scholar) Dr Sanjay Paswan). Click for a related article on dalit scientific achievements, in Jansatta. Earlier I had received the Bharatiya Dharohar…
The long-awaited book Rhodes must Fall, by the Rhodes Must Fall Group at Oxford has been published by Zed books, and is distributed by the University of Chicago press. It carries my censored article “To decolonise math stand up to its false history and bad philosophy” together with a supportive…
The Palestine Technical University, Kadourie, Palestine, is organizing the Sixth Palestinian Conference on Modern Trends in Mathematics and Physics PCMTMP-VI, 5th-8th August 2018. I was invited to give two plenary talks (scheduled on 7th and 8th Aug) on Decolonising mathematics: how and why it makes science better (and enables students…