MATHEMATICS AND RHETORIC

4 credits · Undergraduate

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: “Twice two is four is, in my opinion, nothing but impudence.” Hobbes’ Leviathan: if the sum of the angles of a triangle conflicts with powerful interests, then it may be suppressed “by the burning of all books of Geometry.” Are arithmetic and geometric truths indisputable? Key to freedom? Does their invocation indicate a presumption of truth? Examining cultural productions from multiple times and places, along with relevant scholarship in the history and philosophy of science and mathematics, this course examines rhetoric linked to mathematical discourse and debates over the status of mathematical truths.