Watching music theory reckon with structural racism and entrenched white supremacy has me pondering similar issues structural issues in who we venerate in mathematics.

We have our Schenkers, undoubtedly; Teichmüller, Pontryagin, and Moore come to mind. Thankfully, I think they are generally held in contempt by the academic community, and their names are unknown outside grad school.

They aren't what bothers me.

The deeper structural issue pervading mathematics currently bothering me is the lens through which we view our ancient history.

A standard undergrad degree will teach you about Greek mathematicians, Enlightenment era mathematicians...and no one in between except Fibonacci.

If you look closer at the history, you'll see a curious pattern:

Most results covered in an undergraduate curriculum have a little footnote that says it was actually discovered earlier by an Indian, Chinese, or Muslim mathematician, despite being named after a European.

My favorite example is a pair of footnotes from a linear algebra textbook.

The first breathlessly praises Gauss as one of the three greatest mathematicians and touts his unrelated accomplishments.

The second tersely admits the algorithm in question was known before Gauss.

I don't mind the inaccuracy. Math is filled with bad attributions and worse terminology calcified under the inertia of generations.

The fundamental problem is that we are telling students tales of white genius supermen and "forgetting" to tell them about all the other geniuses.

When I was a wee math lad, I devoured stories about mathematicans. I loved to learn about them as people instead of names.

So why do I know how Gauss impressed his school teacher, but not the names of the Chinese scholars who invented...*ahem*...Gaussian elimination?

Why do I know Pascal was too religious for his own good, but I don't know anything about Pingala, who invented zero and...*ahem*...Pascal's triangle?

Why do I know how Euler worked through dinner, but I don't know where al-Khwarizm lived, namesake of "algebra" and "algorithm"?

Histories are always incomplete, and tend to focus on a few "famous" people at the exclusion of others...but making the story of math into the story of brilliant white people is patently false and actively harmful.

So much of mathematical success is determined by whether people perceive themselves as "good at math".

We are wasting an opportunity to show our students that mathematical brilliance can come from anywhere, and our non-white students are missing out on their own history.

But worse, we are allowing math to be complicit in the myth that white people "built" modern civilization, a myth that is repeatedly central in pseudoscientific justifications for racism and white supremacy.

I, uh, would like to stop being a part of that.

I'm sure none of these thoughts are original, and I have no doubt that smarter folks than I have actually written well-researched works on this. But I was feeling ranty, so here we are.