14 April 2025

Math Is Racist Again (According to The Left)

Or maybe that is "still racist." This is from someone planing how we should teach math in schools. Or not, as the case may be. Math Is Racist? Curriculum Writer Says It Upholds White Supremacy - Liberty Affair

Michael Lolkus— who holds a Ph.D. from Purdue University — made a number of concerning claims in his recent paper, which he published in the last issue of the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, the same journal I was assigned to read when I studied at Barnard College.

In his essay, Lolkus begins by arguing that “educational spaces, particularly those centered on mathematics, uphold and promote whiteness,” and that efforts to fix this are still marred by “white liberal ideas” of what mathematics should be.

Mathematics doesn't care what "you think it should be." You are free to say that 2+2=5, or that there are no right answers, if you're an artist or a dreamer or a politician, but if you don't get the math right when you are building bridges, they will fall down.

Here's an example from 2018, from the National Transportation Safety Board on the collapse of the Florida International University pedestrian bridge in Miama. Pedestrian Bridge Collapse Over SW 8th Street, Miami, Florida

We determined that the probable cause of the Florida International University (FIU) pedestrian bridge collapse was the load and capacity calculation errors made by FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc., (FIGG) in its design of the main span truss member 11/12 nodal region and connection to the bridge deck. Contributing to the collapse was the inadequate peer review performed by Louis Berger, which failed to detect the calculation errors in the bridge design. [my emphasis. Z-Deb]

Six people were killed and ten were injured when the FIU bridge collapsed, and it collapsed because the math was wrong. And yes, the engineering firm in question was hired because they were "diverse." FIGG was removed from several projects, and at least one bridge under construction had to be redesigned for similar issues.

The law of gravity, and the rules of engineering for bridges (like Müller-Breslau) don't care about who you're attracted to, your pronouns, or anything else about YOU. Get the math right, or you will kill people. There are plenty of examples.

  • Dashcam Video of the FIU Bridge Collapse in Miami.
  • The I-35W Bridge Collapse in 2007 in Minneapolis.

    13 people died, 145 were injured. This was a combination of design issues, construction issues, and a maintenance crew parking a load 4 times the designed load on the bridge before resurfacing the roadway. (Staging the equipment and the material on LAND would have been "inconvenient.") There was probably also an opportunity to fix one of the problems from the construction issue, but that would mean spending money on a bridge that "looked fine" and had stood for 50 years.

  • The Collapse of the Silver Bridge – December 15th, 1967. A bridge between Ohio and West Virginia.

    This was caused, in part, because the conditions changed, and no one revisited the load calculations under those new conditions. 46 people died. There were also some issues with the design, and probably with maintenance.

That doesn't include the bridges that have killed people because politicians don't want to spend money on maintenance, even in the face of impending collapse. There are even more examples that fall into that category.

1 comment:

  1. Use their concept of math to shortchange their paycheck and watch how fast they change their minds.

    ReplyDelete

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