Chapter 5: Mathematics and the Yellowing of Ideologies

I recently had the chance to inherit a modest collection of textbooks. Curiosity took over, and I found myself combing through the volumes and running over the pages. Most of the books had been published in Germany from 1850 to 1950; some exceptions came from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I was tempted to start a comprehensive historical and sociological textbook analysis, á la Dowling (1998), looking for strong and weak classification of signifiers and signified, and how this all was related to the political context of the time. Needless to say, I soon realized that this would easily convert into a substantial research program. Being aware of the limits of my intellectual perseverance, I resigned from that self-administered task.