Multicultural Mathematics

Mathematics is multicultural. It is a river with many tributaries, each contributing knowledge — of symbols, processes, and conjectures. The tributaries are distinct from one another in that they spring from various cultures and eras, which supported their growth. The culture of ancient Egypt proved fertile to many ways of calculating, whereas the culture of ancient Greece supported ways of looking at geometry. The quipu of the Aztecs were developed to record complex numerical information. The Chinese culture promoted a respect for scholarship and writing that provides clear evidence of the depth of their mathematics tradition. The Arab culture supported the joy of manipulating abstract truths, which came to be called algebra. The Indian tradition brought us the symbol and notion of zero. More recently, the Western European fascination with astronomy spawned the development of calculus. In other words, the study of mathematics is implicitly multicultural. We have much to gain from making this awareness more explicit in the way we teach mathematics.

Helping our students realize the divergent origins of the current body of mathematics is one more way to help them see that mathematics is a living, constantly developing accumulation of ideas from many eras and cultures. This perception may serve as an invitation for students to be creative and divergent in their own thinking, for this is precisely how the major contributions and improvements were made in the past. Making the multicultural nature of mathematics clear helps students to gain a foothold into the ways of other cultures, and perhaps of one with which they identify. It encourages and supports respect for those cultures, through awareness of their intellectual property, which is what their mathematics truly is.

To begin to help your students become aware of the multicultural nature of math, you’ll want to do some of your own research. The Internet has a number of excellent resources, and there are a number of published books to help. You can incorporate aspects of mathematics that are still identified by the culture that bore them. One accessible route is through the strategy games of a culture, including Oware (or Mancala), Go, and Nim. Another avenue is to analyze the art, needlework, and/or architecture of an ancient or modern culture to find the geometric principles embodied in that culture’s art: symmetry, transformations, rotations, or even fractals.

A third path to identifying the math in modern cultures is to analyze the language patterns in the counting numbers and symbols of that culture. Numerical symbols from ancient civilizations are well worth studying, both for an appreciation of place value and for the comprehension that there are varieties of logical and complex number systems that were not adopted by our current civilization.

Helping students become aware of the multicultural nature of mathematics is a fulfilling and exciting endeavor, which can prompt student as well as teacher engagement. It can be integrated into other disciplines, and it can add a depth to daily classroom work, especially if students are required to write research papers on selected topics. Daily routines can be enriched as well, for the study of the cross cultural measurement of time, calendars, weights, and lengths is rich and diverse.

An explicit awareness of the multicultural nature of mathematics invites children to respect the diversity and creativity within the discipline and to celebrate among and within themselves.

About the Author

Christina Wright, Ph.D., is a math consultant living in Seattle, Washington. She is an adjunct faculty member at Pacific Oaks College Northwest and a frequent facilitator for the online-line Bank Street Forum.