The evolution of mathematics: a rhetorical approach

Abstract

Themes of the strange and surprising have long suffused G. Mitchell Reyes’ scholarly juxtapositions of mathematics and rhetoric. Take his 2005 study of Newton and Leibniz, which pierces the Infinitesimal as a constitutive concept that enabled an empirically impossible task—one cannot really sum an infinite of imaginary rectangles occupying the space under a curved line—with the uncanny force of its explosion into unpredictable intellectual circuits. Or the incisive review “Stranger Relations,” which muses that to enter into the peculiar interface of rhetoric, mathematics, and culture is to pass “outside our alphabetic comfort zones to the edges of the symbolic, where humans and nonhumans meet” (489). Or the recent Arguing with Numbers (with James Wynn) and the chapter that transports us from the classical estrangement of rhetoric and mathematics into rich veins of transdisciplinary work that discern how complex calculations, quantitative quasi-logics, and mathematical semiotics dually reflect and incline rhetorical activity. The stunning impetus of mathematization across disciplines, the formidable potency of numbers in political debate, and the enigmatic power of abstruse algorithms all yield a clear (if not uncontroversial) mandate: “rhetorical scholars can and should make a sustained and coordinated effort to study the rhetorical dimensions of mathematics” (2). Yet if Reyes has long held that the strange and surprising must draw rhetoric toward coherent inquiry, then The Evolution of Mathematics brings this refrain into a new fullness of dimension. The book begins with the same indisputable exigence as Arguing—the fact of our existence at a moment in which mathematical discourses suffuse all facets of social life. Yet here we are called to deeper reflection on how these phenomena “bespeak the strangeness of our world” (2), building on and breaking with the past to radically recompose conditions in ways Reyes describes so poignantly as to be worth citing at length: