Towards an ecological mathematics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11935959 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Siddharth Unnithan Kumar (0000-0002-4747-3820, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Woodstock Road, Oxford, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 476-497 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-0188 • E-ISSN: 1743-2790 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1177/03080188241232766 |
| OpenAlex | W4393075972 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 65 |
Mathematics plays a fundamental role in ecological research, yet its uses remain strikingly separate from advances in the environmental social sciences and humanities. In this paper, I work to address this impasse and outline the motivation and scope for an ‘ecological mathematics’, an approach to doing mathematics in environmental research which foregrounds relationship, embodiment and human difference. I begin by tracing the historical emergence of mathematics in ecology, noting how life processes have been conceptualised in a way which forces them to fit the ideals of mathematical models transplanted from the physical sciences. I then investigate the cultural factors shaping the evolution of mathematical thought, eliciting a malleability in how mathematical knowledge relates to the more-than-human world. This provides a place from which to rethink the role of abstraction in ecological thought, and develop mathematical methods grounded in ecological concepts. Drawing on ethnographic and perceptual accounts of space and time, I work with topological concepts from both mathematics and the social sciences to suggest a new correspondence between these subjects, elaborating a way of employing mathematical techniques which enliven, rather than deaden, the ecologies under study. The paper concludes with important philosophical clarifications to the approach of an ecological mathematics
Biology · Geography · Mathematics education · Sociology · Ecosystem dynamics and resilience · Land Use and Ecosystem Services · Mathematics · Sustainability and Ecological Systems Analysis · Ecology
Nature, culture, and gender
The Politics of Large Numbers
The Golden Age of Theoretical Ecology
Nature
Wildlife in the Anthropocene
The Nutmeg's Curse
Thinking as Communicating
Using Circuit Theory to Model Connectivity in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation
Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation
The application of ‘least-cost’ modelling as a functional landscape model
The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology
Spatial Scaling in Ecology
Exploring complex networks
Animal Spaces, Beastly Places
The Theory of Island Biogeography
Dakota/Lakota Math Connections
A World of Many Worlds
Sacred Ecology
The Death of Nature
Counting generation(s)
Towards a post-mathematical topology
Regions, Networks and Fluids
Mathematics and the Body
The Spell of the Sensuous
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
Geography and abstraction
The Trouble with Wilderness
The Perception of the Environment
Ch'ixinakax utxiwa
An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn
The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative
Situating Technoscience
Earth Is My Mother, Sky Is My Father
The temporality of the landscape
California's Yuki Indians
Indigenous Methodologies
The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography
Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |