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Notes
1 Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks,” 456.
2 Anderson, “The End of Theory.”
3 Harari, “Era of Corona Virus.”.Quoted statements begin at 24m40s of the video.
4 Supiot, Governance by Numbers, 116.
5 Translation quoted from Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks,” 456.
6 Ibid., 455.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 1.
10 Quoted from Morretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees,”,67. Moretti's article proposes a ‘data analytics’ approach to the study of literature and invokes Braudel in this context.
11 Earman, “How Determinism Can Fail,” 817.
12 E.g., Xia, “Existence of non-collision singularities.”
13 Norton, “The Dome,” 786.
14 Malament, “Norton’s Slippery Slope,” 815.
15 Wilson, “What is ‘Classical Mechanics,’” abstract, 43.
16 Ibid., 62.
17 A 2016 survey of research related to an old example of an indeterministic system in classical mechanics, known as the Painlevé Paradox, notes: ‘Painlevé paradox is not just a theoretical curiosity manifest only in “toy” mathematical models of pencils on unrealistically rough surfaces. The consequences of the Painlevé paradox are in fact ubiquitous, even in everyday phenomena. For example, robotic manipulators, pieces of chalk or even your finger are known to judder when they are being pushed across a rough surface’. Champneys and Várkonyi, “The Painlevé paradox”, 539 –540.
18 See Suchting, “Althusser’s Late Thinking.”
19 Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition.”
20 Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks,” 474.
21 Ibid., 464.
22 ‘In the recently published lectures on the history of probability which Karl Pearson gave 50 years ago, Pearson says, “I hold a letter of Clerk Maxwell in which he states” of Saint-Venant and Boussinesq “that their work on Singular Solutions is epoch-making” on account of its being “the great solution to the problem of free will.”’ Ibid., 465.
23 Ibid.
24 See Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 48.
25 Translation quoted from Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 48.
26 ‘There is a teleological grandeur about this new math that gives the imagination wings.’ Vogue, cited on the inside cover of the 20th anniversary edition of Gleick’s Chaos.
27 Order out of Chaos was originally published in French in 1979 as La Nouvelle Alliance, indicating a new alliance between science and arts and humanities. Science Wars erupted in the 1990s.
28 E.g.‘many important chaotic systems, including the earliest and the most influential examples, were first identified and explored not by computer simulation, and not by physical experiment, but by mathematical proof’. Hirsch, “Chaos, Rigor and Hype”, 6–7. For Gleick, this is a view of ‘mathematics strictly as a hermetic enterprise’. Gleick, “James Gleick Responds,”,9.
29 Hirsch recognises the difficulties involved in the exposition of complicated mathematical ideas and assesses Gleick’s writing as ‘first rate’ but concludes: ‘I wish he had given less publicity to the nonexistent science of chaos and more to rigorous mathematics.’ Hirsch considers the book to be in some respects ‘profoundly misleading.’ Hirsch, “Chaos, Rigor and Hype,” 6–7.
30 Beyerchen, “Nonlinear Science,” 25.
31 Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 71–72.
32 See, e.g., Roth and Ryckman,“Chaos, Clio, Scientific Illusions”; Matheson and Kirchhoff, “Chaos and Literature”; Pascale, “Surfing Edge of Chaos.”.
33 Zeleny, “Obituary: Ernst Jantsch,”,119.
34 Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 8.
35 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 141.
36 See D’Eramo, “Rule by Target.”
37 Holman, “Complexity, Self-Organization, and Emergence,”,124.
38 Wheatley, Leadership and New Science, 119.
39 Ibid., 115–116.
40 Ibid., 108.
41 Ibid., 163.
42 Grint, Fuzzy Management, 66.
43 Ibid., 83.
44 Ibid., 181.
45 The first of three volumes appeared in 1857 (London, John W. Perkins). Hacking describes it as a ‘massive work of historical determinism’ and ‘statistical fatalism’. The book made Buckle ‘the lion of the London season’ and ‘instantly took hold in every European language’. Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks”, 471–472. See also Chapter 14, “The astronomical conception of society”, Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 125–132.
46 See Chapter 15, “The mineralogical conception of society”, ibid., 133-141. Le Play’s Les Ouvriers européens (Paris, 1855) contained a selection of case-studies of working-class families. Central to these case-studies was data mining of the household budget: ‘Every item of a year's income in cash and kind was faithfully recorded. Likewise each sort of annual expense was tabulated, not just rent and food, but candles and cabbages.’ Ibid., 135.
47 Ibid., 1.
48 Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks,” 468.
49 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 62.
50 Ibid., 58–62. Babbage's quote is on p. 62.
51 Ibid., 61.
52 Han, Psychopolitics, 57.
53 Ibid., 56, 66.
54 Ibid., 58.
55 I should also mention two accessibly written books on relevant issues: Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and Pablo Jensen’s Your Life in Numbers.
56 Smale, “Mathematical Problems.”
57 See Hansen, “Foundations of Computational Mathematics.”
58 Vegard, Colbrook and Hansen, “Proving Existence Not Enough.”
59 Bender, et al, “Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”, 617.
60 See “Google to change research process after uproar over scientists' firing.” The Guardian, February 26, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/26/google-timnit-gebru-margaret-mitchell-ai-research.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Vladimir Tasić
Vladimir Tasić is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. He is the author of Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought (Oxford University Press, 2001) and has published on the role of mathematics in the works of philosophers such as Alain Badiou. Vladimir served as president of the faculty association at the University of New Brunswick (AUNBT) and is currently on the Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). Email: [email protected]