A mathematician and avid communist in the Soviet Union, Sofya Yanovskaya was born in Bessarabia on this date in 1896. She became a Bolshevik during the Russian revolution and served as an officer in the Communist Party until 1924. Most of her career was spent at the Moscow State University as a scholar of the history, philosophy, and logic of mathematics. Yanovskaya participated for years in Party-run efforts to bring mathematics to “heel” alongside dialectical materialism and other aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet she ultimately became a defender of the scientific integrity of mathematics as an independent discipline. Her thirty-year task of editing Karl Marx’s mathematical writings enabled mathematicians in communist lands, especially in China during the Cultural Revolution, to defend their discipline as legitimate and in the interests of the working class. Yanovskaya was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1951, and in 1959 became the first chairperson of the newly created department of mathematical logic at Moscow State University.
“Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts must be seen as an outstanding model of dialectical practice, and read from the standpoint from which it was written — the struggle for dialectical theory as a guide to revolutionary social practice.” —Andy Blunden
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Where in the wold did you dig up this apparatchik? Who in the world ever said that Marx had anything original to say about mathematics?
Better to admit you couldn’t find anyone for that “Day”.
Here is an essay on how Marxist writings helped mathematicians defend their discipline as legitimate:
http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/viewFile/165/18AnCapraraHao.pdf
But of course, when high schools and colleges were closed down during the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were defined as one of the nine stinking categories (chou lao jiu).
There’s an article in the current issue of Science & Society — “Marx, Calculus, Time, and Dialectics,” by Russell Dale. I find it incomprehensible for my lack of mathematics training (and my lack of understanding of “dialectics”) — but apparently someone besides Sofya Yanovskaya find there to be some originality in Marx’s mathematics!
Hi Mr. Bush.
Thank you for noticing and citing my piece. It is in response to a piece by Carchedi in Science & Society a year or so earlier. It really isn’t very difficult to understand and doesn’t require any particularly deep understanding of mathematics, though of course it is not going to be obvious if you are not familiar with basic calculus.
The main example I give is a version of Carchedi’s example which itself is an version of an example given by the great MIT historian of mathematics and Marxist, the late Dirk Struik (who died in 2000 at 106 years of age! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Jan_Struik). And, in fact, Professor Struik’s example was a slightly more complex version of the main example that Marx used in his mathematical manuscripts that were edited by S. A. Yanovskaya.
I’d be happy to answer any questions you had about the piece.
And, by the way, one doesn’t need a terribly sophisticated idea of “dialectics” to understand what I am arguing–or questioning–in the piece. But, I know the way these things get written, it seems like you do.
My email address is above. I’d be happy to talk to you about the stuff.
Yours,
Russell Dale
To Martin Horowitz,
Many people don’t realize that Marx wrote quite a bit on mathematics in the 1870s, the decade before his death. It is fascinating stuff. Most of it doesn’t get into political economy at all. He was really trying to solve the problems in the calculus that were left unanswered since the 17th century, but raised and widely discussed by all European mathematicians. Marx did not have the benefit of knowing the most recent work going on in the 1870s concerning these topics: the works of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and most importantly Karl Weierstrass whose definition of the derivative and the limit remain to this day, more or less, THE definitions that gets taught in calculus courses when it comes to defining these notions precisely. Until the 1870s, the questions that Marx grappled with in the calculus were widely discussed among mathematicians and philosophers. Credit should DEFINITELY be given to Marx for caring enough as a layperson to delve so deeply that he came to even understand what these questions are. But, more so that he suggests a cogent, albeit incomplete (which he recognizes himself explicitly), strategy for perhaps attacking the problem of how to define the derivative in calculus in a mathematically rigorous way. His strategy is not near at all to the way things are done today–the Weierstrass stuff I mentioned just above–but it is novel and coherent, a feat I find amazing for a person who was really completely self taught in mathematics. It is a REALLY interesting story and it is very surprising that it is not more widely discussed.
As I said in my note to Mr. Bush, I would be happy to discuss this further.
Yours,
Russell Dale