Tag: culture

Culture and Mathematics

During the last few years, there has been significantly improving interest in something known as “mathematics and/in culture” or even “mathematical culture” in the history and viewpoint of mathematics. Thoughts of “culture” have already been used in the record of the sciences in arithmetic knowledge analysis for some time, but they are relatively new in the history of mathematics. Yet, they are incredibly exciting as I see them providing a two-fold promise:

On the one side, focus on mathematics and/in culture allows for the further analysis of mathematics as an individual action programmed and formed by the culture which it is created and impacting that culture in return. For a long time, mathematics has been designed so that it belong to a separated world — to Ivory Tower so to speak, as it were, perhaps limited by its situations, but providing little with regards to impact on wider culture. However, latest improvements in analysis have permitted us to remedy that scenario and analysis resemblances and impacts between different factors of culture such as mathematics, literary works, art, and science. On the other hand, the idea of societies within mathematics provides us with a device box for examining traditional improvements in math that are not so quickly taken under other techniques of study such as conventional periodizations, paradigms, analysis programs, designs, or even methods.

Lately, a number of educational conventions and classes have been dedicated to such conversations. They are important not only for scholarly research of the history and viewpoint of mathematics, but also for the present. Social techniques, so it seems, offer a way of making mathematics available for a wider audience by linking it with a scaffold of current cultural information of literary works, history, art, social and scientific topics and so on. Therefore, it is also of importance to upper secondary education where advertising mathematics in trans-disciplinary segments with other factors of European culture is growing as a new task.

Humanities

The humanities are educational professions that research the human situation, using methods that are mainly systematic, critical, or speculative, as recognized from the mainly scientific techniques of the natural sciences. The humanities consist of historical and contemporary ‘languages’, literary works, history, viewpoint, belief, and performing arts such as music and cinema. The humanities that are also considered as social sciences consist of history, anthropology, area research, communication studies, social studies, law and linguistics. College students working in the humanities are sometimes described as “humanists”. However, that phrase also explains the philosophical position of humanism, which some “antihumanist” scholars in the humanities reject. Some additional educational institutions offer humanities classes, usually made up of English literary works, international research, and art.

 

The phrase “humanities” came from the Latin phrase studia humanitatis, or “study of humanitas” (a traditional Latin term meaning in addition to “humanity”, “culture, processing, education” and, specifically, an “education suitable for a cultured man”). In its utilization in the early Fifteenth century, the studia humanitatis was a course of studies that contains sentence structure, poems, rhetoric, history, and ethical viewpoint, mainly resulting from the research of Latin and Greek classics. The phrase humanitas also provided rise to the Renaissance German neologism umanisti, whence “humanist”, “Renaissance humanism”.

In the Western hemisphere, the research of the humanities can be tracked to ancient Greece, as the basis for a wide education for people. During Roman times, the idea of the seven liberal arts progressed, including sentence structure, rhetoric and reasoning (the trivium), along with mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium).

A major move happened with the Renaissance humanism of the 15th century, when the humanities started to be considered as topics to be studied rather than used, with a corresponding move away from the conventional areas into areas such as literary works and history. In the Twentieth century, this view was in turn pushed by the postmodernist activity, which desired to change the humanities in more egalitarian conditions appropriate for a democratic community.