Towards an Ecological Mathematics

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• Dr Siddharth Unnithan Kumar
• Tuesday 07 May 2024, 13:00-14:00
• Venue to be confirmed.

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Mathematics has an awkward relationship with the more-than-human world, their thresholds of correspondence sedimented with apparent dichotomies between abstraction and embodiment, transcendence and immanence, quantitative and qualitative. In this talk, I would like to explore what it might mean to ecologise mathematics and reorient its presence in the world at a time of great precarity for the biosphere.

We begin by looking at the development of mathematical methods in ecology, wherein biological phenomena have been conceptualised in the image of theories from the physical sciences. To elicit a malleability in the relationship between mathematics and more-than-human world, we turn to ethnomathematics for bringing to light the cultural factors guiding the evolution of mathematical thought, and we question how abstraction might be used to enliven and make vivid, rather than mute and eclipse, the nonhuman Other. This leads us to the world-making powers of language and metaphor in shaping one’s perception of and relationship with the living landscape, and the reciprocity between richness of language and richness of thought. Finally, we draw on topological concepts from the humanities, social sciences and mathematics to approach questions of space and time in environmental research.

Biography: Dr Siddharth Unnithan Kumar

After training in mathematics, Siddharth has worked closely with geographers, ecologists, anthropologists, and Indigenous scholars, among others. Following the completion last year of his doctorate, with a thesis titled ‘Mathematical ecology in a more-than-human world’, Siddharth has recently started a postdoctorate with the University of Exeter’s Renew programme, working with ecologist Kevin Gaston to develop the uses of mathematics in environmental research. This has involved bringing mathematical methods into correspondence with embodied experience of nature through the concept of a ‘personalised ecology’; and writing a mathematical model for the spatial prioritisation of nature recovery. Alongside this, Siddharth is exploring what it might look like to ecologise mathematics, with particular attention to the reciprocal relationship between inner and outer worlds of human experience.

This talk is part of the Political Ecology Group meetings series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Department of Geography
• Venue to be confirmed

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