Visions of the Mathematical

Abstract

Mathematics: the science of space and number, the study of pattern and structure, the queen of sciences. To think mathematically affords a powerful means to understand and control one’s social and physical reality. Yet despite some twelve or so years of compulsory mathematical education, most children in the developed world leave school with only limited access to mathematical ideas, or much affinity with the idea of taking a mathematical point of view. In many cultures including our own, it is quite acceptable — even fashionable — to admit ignorance of things mathematical in ways which would be inexcusable in relation to art, literature or music.

In North Greenland distances are measured in sinik, in ‘sleeps’, the number of nights that a journey requires. It’s not a fixed distance. Depending on the weather and the time of year, the number of sinik can vary. It’s not a measurement of time either. Under the threat of a storm, I’ve travelled with my mother non-stop from Force Bay to Iita, a distance that should have required two nights.

Sinik is not a distance, not a number of days or hours. It is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon, a concept of space-time, it describes the union of space and motion and time that is taken for granted by the Inuit but that cannot be captured by any European everyday language.

The European measurement of distance, the standard meter in Paris, is something quite different. It’s a concept for reshapers, for those whose primary view of the world is that it must be transformed. Engineers, military strategists, prophets. And mapmakers. Like me.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Høeg, 1994, p. 278)