Abstract
Here the hypothesis of the previous chapter is questioned about a determinative influence of central Africa on Egypt and ancient Greece. It recalls the “black Athena debate” that raged for a while in the United States, discussing, among many other matters, the meaning of the so-called “multicultural” mathematics. Still, the last word is left to an uncontested authority in the history of mathematics, J. Struik (Mass. Inst. of Technology), who quoted Molière’s “bourgeois gentilhomme” about his ignorance that he “spoke in prose”: maybe the “bourgeois colonizers” do not realize until today that Africans did mathematics?
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10 December 2019
The original version of the book was inadvertently published with incorrect figure caption for Fig. 10.4 as “Cartoon about African roots of Egyptian pharaohs”. The caption has now been corrected as “Cartoon about African roots of the Egyptian pharaohs based on a drawing in “The Skeptical Inquirer””.
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Huylebrouck, D. (2019). Not Out of Africa. In: Africa and Mathematics. Mathematics, Culture, and the Arts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04037-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04037-6_10
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