The fundamental question about conflicts is their consequences for people’s lives. From the lives lost and threatened, to those whose daily life is altered in the face of terror, either by displacement or by any interruption that simply did not need to occur. On another level are the effects on civilization; just see the destruction of the Syrian city of Palmyra, inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, or the looting of the archaeological sites of Mari, Ebla and Emar, also in Syria. But there are consequences for the functioning of science, not so evident in the news, but no less important.
The scientific meeting that celebrates and guides world mathematics is the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). In July 2022, this landmark meeting would take place in Saint Petersburg: the lists of speakers from around the world were already known, who were preparing to disembark in a vibrant city, which would breathe mathematics for a handful of days. But behold, the live wheel arrives and carries the ICM there: due to the invasion of Ukraine, the International Mathematical Union announced that the congress will take place remotely. It was not the first time that the ICM suffered the effects of the political scenario.
In 1936, the congress took place in Oslo, in a Norway that was part of the League of Nations – the same that in 1935 had imposed sanctions on Italy for the occupation of Ethiopia. In response to the sanctions, Mussolini made it difficult for Italian participation in the congress and the scientific damage fell on the area of ​​algebraic geometry, since at that time its main exponents were Italians. A similar situation happened with topology, whose representativeness suffered from the absence of great names in Russian mathematics, since the Norwegians had offered Trotskyi exile. One can imagine that this welcome did not increase the country’s popularity with Stalin’s Politburo.
The 1935 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, responsible for denouncing the rearmament and remilitarization of Germany – a fact that did not raise the esteem of the Nazi command for Oslo. On the other hand, Nazi anti-Semitic legislation created a significant volume of mathematicians of Jewish descent without jobs in German universities, many of whom used the ICM in Oslo to seek positions or simply interact with colleagues in the international community. In summary, a single edition of the profession’s reference event portrays the instability in which it is inserted.
Now, if we consider the displacement of people caused by conflicts, there are relevant impacts on a society’s stock of knowledge. A recent example of these exodus was the migration of European Jews in the 30s and 40s of the last century. If, on the one hand, there was a positive impact on the countries of destination – see Albert Einstein and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – on the other hand, how many Fields medals and Nobel prizes were lost along the way?
Here, the scope needs to be expanded: what was the impact of slavery on the stock of knowledge of African peoples torn from their land? A history of African mathematics obliterated by centuries of the human trade is being revealed.
For example, it is known that in the Yoruba language, spoken in the region of present-day Nigeria, the number 45 is said as “subtract five and subtract ten from three times twenty”. Similar to the quatre-vingt-dix spoken in the cradle of the Enlightenment, the Yoruba way of counting is evidence of this people’s familiarity with numbers and their operations. Incidentally, the quantity “twenty” works as a block: forty is said to be twice twenty, one hundred is said to be five times twenty, and nineteen is said to be twenty minus one.
Dexterity with numbers, by the way, was not lacking in Thomas Fuller. Born between Liberia and Benin, Fuller was enslaved and transported to the United States in 1724 at the age of fourteen. His skill with mental calculations drew the attention of his surroundings and he was able to answer, in about two minutes, how many seconds there were in a year and a half. He died in 1780 without receiving formal instruction. And imagine if he had!
And then there’s the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad Al-Kishwani, who studied in Katsina, now northern Nigeria. His main work appeared in 1732, and dealt with the construction of magic squares of order 11. Al-Kishwani died in Cairo in 1741.
To fight a deadly virus or preserve the environment, or even analyze massive amounts of data, science is needed. But irrationality, which threatens life, is not. You don’t have to be a Thomas Fuller to choose right.
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Edgard Pimentel is a researcher at the Center for Mathematics at the University of Coimbra and a professor at PUC-Rio.
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