Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Associate Editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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I hope you enjoy listening to today's discussion.

My name is Jonathan Kay, and I am Quilets Canadian editor.

When we think about the culture wars and the politicization

of university scholarship, few of us think of mathematics

as a likely flashpoint.

The history of colonialism?

Sure. The literary canon?

Absolutely.

But math?

How could the study of such topics as statistics, topology, and number theory ever

be attacked as embodying systematic racism or white privilege.

Yet a recent controversy involving retired Georgia Institute of Technology Mathematics Professor Ted Hill

has highlighted that math can be every bit as controversial as

evolutionary biology. An issue is a paper Hill co-authored about the

Greater Male Variability Hypothesis or GMVH which says that men are more variable than women with respect to various

personality traits, including intelligence, which means in a nutshell that there are more male dummies out there than there are female dummies

...