Using Math To Rethink Gender (encore)
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
According to mathematician Eugenia Cheng, maybe not. In her new book, x+y, she challenges readers to think beyond their ingrained conceptions of gender. Instead, she calls for a new dimension of thinking, characterizing behavior in a way completely removed from considerations of gender.
Cheng argues that at every level — from the interpersonal to the societal — we would benefit from focusing less on gender and more on equitable, inclusive interactions, regardless of a person's gender identity.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:05.8 | So one of the things I most remember from elementary school is all of the math word problems. |
| 0:11.4 | You know what I'm talking about. |
| 0:12.9 | The ones that say things like, okay, if Alex has seven cookies and Sam has three cookies, |
| 0:18.1 | how many cookies do we need to give Sam to make sure they have the same number of cookies? |
| 0:25.2 | I would get so excited every time I got the right answer to one of these problems. |
| 0:29.0 | Anyway, this one is actually pretty easy. |
| 0:31.2 | Well, we could give four more cookies to Sam or we could take four cookies from Alex. |
| 0:37.4 | Or we could make Alex give two cookies to Sam in any of these things. |
| 0:41.8 | But for Eugenia Chang, a mathematician, the better answer is actually to ask a different question. |
| 0:48.9 | What if Sam doesn't even like cookies and would rather have apples? |
| 0:55.2 | See, Eugenia studies this kind of high level math I'd never heard of, to be honest, called category theory. |
| 1:03.1 | Yes, category theory is a very abstract part of math. |
| 1:06.9 | And it's so abstract that sometimes even other pure mathematicians think it's too abstract. |
| 1:12.2 | But for me, it's about the core of what makes math tick. |
| 1:17.2 | And because math for me is about the core of what makes the world tick, |
| 1:20.9 | category theory is like the core core of what makes the world tick. |
| 1:25.5 | Because category theory is about understanding why things work the way they do. |
| 1:30.8 | Intrinsic characteristics don't really matter. |
| 1:33.5 | What matters is how things relate to one another. |
| 1:36.1 | It started in around the middle of the 20th century. |
| 1:39.8 | And in a way, it's only a very small, small new idea. |
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