Karine Chemla: How Sources from the Ancient World Allow Us to Rethink the Meaning and History of Mathematical Symbolism: A Perspective Inspired by Chinese Sources

Please join us for the next session of the Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series @ Harvard on Tuesday, October 8, 10:30–11:45 am ET over Zoom.

Our speaker is Karine Chemla of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and the details of her talk are as follows:

HOW SOURCES FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD ALLOW US TO RETHINK THE MEANING AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLISM: A PERSPECTIVE INSPIRED BY CHINESE SOURCES

The common historiography of mathematical symbolism holds that it is a “European invention.” This view has been disputed based on Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese sources. These challenges to the mainstream historiography, however, tacitly accept the common understanding of what mathematical symbolism means. In this talk, I question how we commonly conceive of mathematical symbolism, suggesting that this conception was essential to the claim of its “Europeanness.” I further argue that sources from the ancient world help us understand mathematical symbolism better, showing that it has a much longer and more global history than previously thought.

About our speaker: Karine Chemla is a historian of science and mathematics in ancient and medieval China at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her current work focuses, from a historical anthropology viewpoint, on the relationship between mathematics and the various cultures in the context of which it is practiced. She co-edited, with Evelyn Fox Keller, Cultures without culturalism: The making of scientific knowledge (2017) and with Agathe Keller and Christine Proust, Cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world (2022). She was awarded the Otto Neugebauer Prize (European Mathematical Society, 2020) and the Neuenschwander Prize (European Society for the History of Science, 2024).

Zoom registration: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

We hope you will be able to join us for this and subsequent talks, listed below:

October 15 | Amit Prasad | “Contestations over Stem Cell Ethics and the US-China Tech War: What Should We Do with Their Orientalist and Colonial Framing?”

October 29 | Dafna Zur | “How to Talk to Martians: Socialist vs. Capitalist Science in Korean SF” 

November 12 | Fei Huang | “Bathing through Time and Landscape: A Longue Durée History of Hot Springs in China (1000–1945)” 

November 26 | Sulfikar Amir | “Living in a Hot City: Urban Heat Mitigation in Informal Settlements in Megacity Jakarta” 

December 3 | Togo Tsukahara | “Environmental History in Transnational Networks: Climate History Described by Rangaku, Dutch Navy, and Japan’s Colonial Meteorology”

More information at https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia.