I first stopped when a student replied that she put the x-axis at her heart, “because that’s the centre of me!” I always considered math to be mainly a universe language which develops most dependently with age, but this seemed like quite a cultural, and even personal, representation of math. It was interesting to think that different people would create a graph in their head differently depending on their personality. I naively assumed everyone would just see a graph in their head.
I next stopped to admire 'Die gantze Welt in ein Kleberblat [sic],' and found it fascinating that "Jerusalem was taken to be the umbilical connection point between heaven and earth, the omphalos, the point where earthly and celestial axes meet." It is incredible to see the variations of maps throughout history and how they completely changed depending on history and culture.It further expanded on the idea that math isn't a simple representation of facts, but a cultural representation of facts through mathematics. It brings credence to Nietzsche's philosophy of, "Nein, gerade Tatsachen gibt es nicht, nur Interpretationen.": There are no facts; simply interpretations.
Lastly, Table 1 of the text was very interesting to look at and caused me pause. I reread all of the tables and compared them to other cultures that I was familiar with. Thinking about how they perceived their bodies, houses, mythology, and mathematics, it was eye-opening to see the relationships. How each one is understood within the context of their culture has effects on how they comprehend and map out the others. It is something that I would be interested in reading more in-depth over a broader range of cultures.
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