Mathematics and Society

Abstract

Abstract Mathematics and Society studies a regional tradition of mathematics in Tamil-speaking South India. It questions a received picture of Indian history of mathematics. It reflects on how specific, historically situated mathematical practices reveal the limitations of nationalist frameworks of narrating histories of science. But it shall not endorse a Tamil nationalist reading of this tradition either. On the contrary, this book explores the history of mathematics in south India in terms of its varied public circulation. It tries to capture imagined audiences for various experiments and investigates modes of mathematical practice, teaching and learning. It engages with historical sources as records of practice, and brings the world of the practitioners as central to a social history of mathematics in India. It demonstrates how such an approach would help us depart from the cultural and intellectual preoccupation with dualisms of theory and practice, nation and region, Sanskrit and the vernacular, pure and applied. Rather, it situates practices and pathways of mathematization in early modern south India within the political economy of resource distribution to interrogate the character of abstraction in and from practices. It asks how do we understand and contend with the quest for universalism in knowledge amidst social segregation and fragmentation and caste-bound occupational hierarchies. How could such an inquiry help us with the task of annihilation of hierarchies in knowledge, work, and in society to re-imagine modes of democratisation and freedom in our own pedagogic practices.