What's in a Name: On the Acknowledgement of Non-European Mathematical Traditions in the Classroom

I want to state from the outset of this post that, by necessity, I come to this question from a position of relative blindness. While I can speculate all I want about the benefits of acknowledging non-European mathematicians and mathematics, I have neither the evidence base nor the lived experience that would be required to more strongly ground my musings.

What I can speak to, however, is how I have benefitted from the heavy acknowledgement given to European and Western sources of mathematics. To start with, I have never felt culturally out-of-place is a mathematics classroom or venue; while certainly a large portion of this must have to do with the current demographics and culture of mathematics, I was also brought up (as were many if not all of my peers) with the idea that mathematics was mostly the product of white Europeans. Implicit in this view is that me, and people like me, were natural inheritors of our ancestors’ mathematical legacy. At an even more fundamental level, even when I struggled with mathematics (and I have, believe me!), I rarely felt like those struggles were an indication that I was inherently unsuited to mathematics; after all, so many of the current and past mathematicians known to me were demographically similar to me. I don’t want to speculate overmuch on how other people experienced mathematics, but I can imagine that a lack of such visibility and representation would amount to yet another hurdle to feeling like one belongs in mathematics. Without this sense of belonging, I can imagine students would be less motivated to learn, quicker to get discouraged, have greater fear of making mistakes (i.e. stereotype threat), and be more likely to exclude ‘being a math person’ from their self-conception.

On the subject of mathematical naming conventions, I have to say that I personally don’t have a strong emotional attachment to the use of particular European mathematicians’ names in theorems and concepts. What I will say in defense of such naming is that these names, along with the stories sometimes attached to them, can make it easier to remember these concepts; imagine asking the average person about the determinant of a quadratic, as opposed to asking them to recall the Pythagorean Theorem. Even Pascal’s triangle, a concept that doesn’t get a lot of mileage in a high school math class, rings a bell for a lot of people. The thing is, obviously, that there is nothing about the European origin of these names that makes them easier to remember, just the use of people’s names and stories generally. At the same time, to change these names now would create, at least temporarily, a confusion where older and younger mathematicians and students of mathematics will be using different names for the same concepts; since math is already difficult for a lot of people as it is, this might be undesirable. Regardless of how feasible it would be to change the name of math theorems and concepts, we can certainly acknowledge, when giving these names, the non-European contributions to said concepts; we can even point out, when applicable, that despite having a European name, many concepts can be traced back to even older, non-European mathematical traditions.