12/04/2023

Folha: Mathematics in the Humanities

Divulgação

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

If I earned a dollar every time someone told me, "I never got along with math, I'm a humanities person," I'd be very well off!

In fact, recent advances in neuroscience show that no one is born "of the exact sciences" or "of the humanities": the human brain is surprisingly plastic, and it is the experiences of the early years, even before school, that influence its receptiveness to mathematics in adulthood. Crucial information for parents and guardians…

But there's something else that bothers me about the exact sciences/humanities dichotomy: the fact that it ignores the countless connections between these two facets of knowledge. That's why I find it very gratifying, among other things, to see how often mathematics is mentioned in the literature, even if the reader isn't always aware of it. Examples abound: I've already written about some here, but I'm learning about many more.

The English mathematician Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) was a mathematics professor. Therefore, it's not surprising that his works " Alice's Adventures in Wonderland " and "Through the Looking-Glass" are full of perplexing mathematical paradoxes. "Let's see: 4 times 5 is 12, and 4 times 6 is 13, and 4 times 7 is… Oh dear! I'll never get to 20 at this rate!" laments Alice. But it's not merely a game of contradictions: "Alice" is also a satire of mathematics, which was becoming more abstract, with concepts like imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometries that the conservative Carroll repudiated.

In " Candide ," the famous satirical work by the French thinker Voltaire (1694–1778), the mention of mathematics is ironic, as one might expect. The Bordeaux Academy of Sciences offers a prize to whoever can explain why Candide's sheep's wool is red. And the prize is given "to a wise man from the North who demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep had to be red and die of smallpox."

But in the monumental " The Brothers Karamazov," by the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), mathematics touches the very foundations of existence. "You need to note the following: if God exists and if He really created the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to Euclidean geometry, and the human mind with the conception of only three spatial dimensions," states Ivan Karamazov.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.