And yet, the politics of mathematics are still with us, bubbling beneath the surface. We sense it in the rule of professional “experts,” champions of order and necessity, who are forever seeking to present their claim in a mathematical mantle. They hope to infuse their arguments with a touch of mathematics’ aura of inevitability. We also sense it in the indifference, and even hostility towards mathematics of students and citizens. They refuse to engage with a field that will impose it absolute truths upon them, and never ask for their considered opinion. We see it in the schools, in the repeated struggles between “new math” and “old math” teaching methods, which map closely onto the political divisions between Left and Right.

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Bürdet wer Fehlfliege

anleitet als Gelenktankstelle

schleift und schmiert

das Fossil fühlig mit

gereichterten Augenzellen

luftig die Zufuhr matter

Baracken mit Lebendfingern

beschirmter Versuch

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Has mathematics today become depoliticized? To some extent, surely. Since the 19^th century mathematics has dissociated itself from the world, creating a universe of wonders all to itself. Absolute universal and necessary truths may still rule in this alternate reality, but they have only tangential bearing on the realities of the world as we know it. We are safe from the tyranny of mathematics, and it is safe from our materialist heresies.

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The materialist mathematics of the 17^th century was a subversive mathematics. Instead of imposing order on a chaotic world, materialist mathematics started with the world as it is, and abstracted from it. Traditional mathematics, exemplified by Euclidean geometry, was a “mathematics from above”, bestowing divine order on a recalcitrant world. The indivisiblist methods of Cavalieri and Harriot were a “mathematics from below,” deriving truth from the world as it is. Hierarchy and order vs. egalitarianism and the risk of chaos; such were the politics of early modern mathematics.

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Im gespateten Vogelholz

kleben Kerbelmeisen mit

angeflanschten Beinen

zwei Augenpunkte im

Selbstschlag als Astobst

und Knotenstock

lärcht das Waldholz

fruchtet

scheucht

oder schwärmt?

Am Werwein lang der
Günderode, Günderode
wieviel Wind
wiegt der Norden
nässt der Talsaft
wer wässert das Schieferschwein
daran vorbei astronautet
in den Wagner-Schlund
Weltende rauchte als trat
die Rakete auf
Sonderbetrug im Schleifenstein
nagt
und bettet
reine gleichmässige
Halme

Ingrid Wiener: Erste Schritte auf dem Weg zu Bayes # 6, Gobelin 2007, 34×50cm nach Blei- und Filzstiftnotizen auf DIN A4

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And if mathematics is itself material? Then the world is turned upside-down. If even this most trusted guarantor of necessity and hierarchy turns out to be based on lowly chaotic matter, then what hope is there for an ordered universe? Matter will rule reason, the body will rule the soul, and all hope for salvation, in this world or the next, vanishes. To those who, like the Jesuit fathers, champion an ordered world and a hierarchical social order, in which everything and everyone have their God-given place, nothing could be more sinister than a material mathematics.

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