4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast. We are weekly guide to the numbers in the |
0:04.8 | news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. |
0:11.5 | If I asked you to think of a famous mathematician, what would you say? Pythagoras maybe or |
0:16.6 | Gaussel, Leibniz? They're not bad answers, but according to my guests today, they're dependent |
0:22.9 | on a warped view of mathematics, which favors the few, rather than the many from around the world |
0:29.3 | who've observed mathematics and studied it throughout history, and who contribute to the understanding |
0:34.4 | we have today. Dr Kate Kittigawa wants to put that right, and along with her co-author, Dr |
0:40.4 | Timothy Revel, she's written a book, The Secret Lives of Numbers. Kate, welcome to More or Less. |
0:46.8 | Hello, thanks for having me today. Why did you and Timothy decide you wanted to write this book? |
0:52.8 | So first, we shared this love of math, and we talked about history altogether. In the end, |
1:01.0 | this global history of mathematics is very interesting to tell, so that we just decided to |
1:06.5 | write in a form of the book and like to share this with the world. I think global history of |
1:12.3 | mathematics is a very nice way to describe it. Tell us a little bit about some of those early |
1:17.2 | contributions to mathematical ideas. Yes, so we usually know about those big names from |
1:24.0 | possibly ancient Greeks, but in Babylonia, in Maya, in India, in ancient China, there are many |
1:31.6 | people who try to understood the same thing, for example, about the shapes, or about astronomy, |
1:38.5 | and like how does that move? One of the characters you describe in the book is Banjao, |
1:45.0 | one of the first female mathematicians and female historians, who I think lived about two thousand |
1:50.7 | years ago. That's right. She learned about how to write and also how to describe phenomena |
1:57.4 | including astronomy. So she's got a teaching position in the court to teach female figures, |
2:05.5 | including impress, and she started to become a prominent figure in the court, and she also took |
2:12.3 | over the writing of history of the hand dynasty. So she was like both mathematician and also historian. |
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