The purest mathematics, weaponised for privacy
Global in scope·An enduring case
Number theorists studied primes for centuries as the discipline's most ornamental corner, celebrated precisely for uselessness, until public-key cryptography made those results the load-bearing wall of online banking and private messaging. Utility arrived two generations after the knowledge. No forecast of useful research would have funded it.
The concepts this raises
Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.
- ValuesKnowledge and Society
- What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.
- ExplanationGrounds of Knowledge
- An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.
Where it sits in the knowledge framework
- Scope
- What this area of knowledge is about, what problems it takes as its own, and where its questions stop being answerable by its methods. Scope is where you examine why a discipline exists at all and what it deliberately leaves to others.
Areas of knowledge
The same ideas, somewhere else
Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.
- The Middle East and North Africa
The book that named algebra
Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise systematised equation-solving for inheritance shares and trade, and its title gave algebra its name while his own gave us…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Culture
- Explanation
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- East Asia
Move 37
In its 2016 match against Lee Sedol, AlphaGo played a move professional commentators initially called a mistake and later called beautiful, a line no human…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values
- South Asia
Measuring national happiness
Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture