The Two Cultures in a Multicultural Society

In 1959, In his lecture ‘The Two Cultures,’ C.P. Snow stated that western society is split into two cultures with sciences on one side and humanities on the other. Thus Mathematics, the purest of all sciences, and the Arts, the most liberal of all humanities studies, are at opposite extremes. The technological world today needs both, so how do we teach mathematics to artists? For mathematicians short ‘aha-erlebnis’ suffices, but arts students need a more creative approach. Moreover, due to the extensive immigration to Western Europe, ‘universal’ mathematics often clashes with students’ cultural backgrounds. In the US, courses on ‘Black Mathematics’ have been developed for the African-American community, but this is not the case in Western Europe. The author has written a book about ‘multicultural mathematics, and teaches many topics it covers to his architecture students. He also has a theatre presentation called ‘Africa + mathematics’, that combines music and mathematics. The examples given during the presentation will report on some interdisciplinary collaborations involving mathematics and art and will provide examples from the West and from Africa.status: publishe