Abstract
Marshall McLuhan’s work has been well-extended to the study of writing, fitting McLuhan’s literary background and debt to early grammatological research. Less explored is the applicability of McLuhan’s core concepts to mathematics, despite the mediated nature of most acts of counting, measuring, reckoning, and patterning. This paper applies the foundational concepts of Understanding Media to measurement, drawing on two case studies in the history and anthropology of mathematics. The first case study, from the history of mathematics, explores historian Sebatai Unguru’s polemical call to engage ancient treatises in their original notation, a call that recognizes mathematical reasoning as inherently mediated. The second case study, from the anthropology of mathematics, turns to Marcia Ascher’s work cataloging graphs from non-Western mathematical traditions, as well as Ascher’s observation that such graphs frequently blend mathematics and poetic narrative. Examining such studies through McLuhan’s work, a properly mediated understanding of mathematics will suggest a much closer relationship between the verbal and the metrical, with important consequences for media theory, embodied poetics, and scientific epistemology. This study, written by a media scholar with a similar audience in mind, does not assume math literacy above algebra. Some clarifying terms from the philosophy of mathematics are defined early in the paper.
Presenters
Michael Hessel MialVisiting Assistant Professor, English, Rockhurst University, Missouri, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus—The Data Galaxy: The Un-Making of Typographic Man?
KEYWORDS
McLuhan, Mathematics, Measure, History, Anthropology, Literature, Poetics, Embodiment
