Decolonising Mathematics: How and why it makes science better (and enables students to solve harder problems)

Abstract

Mathematics is not universal. Traditional normal mathematics accepted both empirical proofs and reasoning, as does science, but formal mathematics prohibits the empirical. Prohibiting the empirical is obviously disadvantageous for applications of mathematics to science, but colonial education anyway replaced normal by formal math, declaring the latter to be superior without any critical examination, and globalised it.