TOK situations that are global in scope
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from global.
- Global
The proof no human has read
The 1976 proof of the four colour theorem relied on computer checking of hundreds of case configurations that no mathematician could verify by hand, and parts…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Certainty
- Global
The economy that does not count the household
National accounts exclude most unpaid household and care work by definitional choice, leaving activity that sustains every economy outside its headline…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- Global
The map that inflated the north
The Mercator projection, ideal for navigation, wildly inflates land near the poles, so generations of classroom maps showed Greenland rivalling Africa, which…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- Global
The first woman to win the Fields Medal
Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian-born and educated through Tehran's olympiad system, became in 2014 the first woman awarded mathematics' highest honour, in a…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Perspective
- Culture
- Global
When oral tradition entered the courtroom
In the Delgamuukw case, Canada's Supreme Court held that Indigenous oral histories must be admitted as evidence of land rights on their own terms rather than…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- Global
The textbook findings that would not repeat
Large replication projects in psychology found that many celebrated effects shrank or vanished on rerun, implicating flexible analysis, publication bias and…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Justification
- Certainty
- Global
The purest mathematics, weaponised for privacy
Number theorists studied primes for centuries as the discipline's most ornamental corner, celebrated precisely for uselessness, until public-key cryptography…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Values
- Explanation
- Global
A museum for art with no artist
A museum devoted entirely to AI-generated art opened in Los Angeles in 2026, while courts have held that copyright protects works of human authorship, leaving…
Current · The arts
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Global
Ninety seconds to midnight
The Doomsday Clock compresses expert judgment about nuclear and climate risk into a single metaphorical time, set each year by a board and reported worldwide.…
Current · The human sciences
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- Global
Manufacturing consensus, in the good sense
IPCC reports pass through nested drafting, expert review and line-by-line governmental approval of summaries, producing calibrated language about confidence…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
Origins, evidence and access
Investigations into COVID-19's origins produced assessments hedged at low confidence and split between agencies, with early data incomplete and access to sites…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture