My paper appeared online:

Alexandre Borovik, “The Tool/Weapon Duality of Mathematics,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 16 Issue 1 (January 2026), pages 365-392. Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol16/iss1/24

Hopefully, it is sufficiently controversial. It raises issues which really deserve discussion. And some of them may equally apply to physics and computer science.

If you can, please spread the word and help distribute the link (or the paper itself) wider. The paper is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0.

I can add a comment that I have already received from Yuri Bazlov:

Thank you! Personally, I liked the conspicuous juxtaposition of the Isaiah and Joel quotes (exactly in the middle of the paper). Isaiah is overcited and honoured by the sculpture at the UN in New York. Yet Joel paints a picture that is no less valid, and resonates much more with the current reality.

And, by the way, waging war per se is not necessarily frowned upon by the Tanakh (Old Testament). Bad are spilling of innocent blood, sexual violence, extreme cruelty, unjustified plunder, and moving people out of their land to sell into captivity. This roughly correlates with the more modern concept of “crimes against humanity” – I would call them crimes against our civilisation.

I challenge you to give an example where mathematics was/is used not just for war but for such crimes.

Yet our civilisation – Western? Judeo-Christian? – is not defined just by the crimes against it. Commandment number 1 in the Old Testament is “Be fruitful and multiply”, which to me is a view that human creativity (a reflection of divine creativity) is not a process of redistributing a fixed stock, but of generating wealth. (The Bible uses the term “blessing” to avoid a narrow, materialistic view of wealth. Blessing is transmissible without depletion.)

In this sense, there is no duality to mathematics: essentially, it has always been a creative process, and so a means of generating wealth. The examples that you give do not at all convince the reader that mathematics can be used in some kind of zero-sum or negative-sum game: the long-term effect is always positive.

So, “mathematics is the one where people engaged have the highest degree of freedom…” reflects the creative essence of mathematics. But you seem to contradict this with “Mathematics, as we know it, was born as a weapon of subjugation and tyrannic control” – I doubt that that truly reflects the origin of mathematics. Perhaps one could say that human creativity, and in particular mathematics, found a way to flourish despite tyranny.

The way you showcase the views of James C. Scott does lend your paper an aura of (mild) controversy – his views are hardly mainstream. But then, all history and all ethics is controversial, unless merely an exercise in conformism.

If I need, or am asked, to do an “ethics review” of some research or a grant application, I will surely cite your paper!

Also, I discovered a website of The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft a document The dual use problem in mathematics:

In many cases, basic research in both theoretical and applied mathematics has the potential to be significant to security-related research as well (possibly not until later). Just as a knife as a cutting tool can always be used as a weapon too, mathematical methods investigated in the field of control theory, for example, can often be used for both peaceful and military purposes. The same applies in the field of number theory with regard to its application in the fields of cryptography and coding theory. The answer to this cannot be a general ban on basic mathematical research of course.

However, aspects and issues regarding security-related research should be addressed in accordance with the applicable rules and laws when there is evidence of the potential concrete applicability of mathematical research in security-related areas. Indications might include the field of application targeted by the researchers themselves, or else their own previous research background or that of cooperation partners. In the case of cooperative projects, one point that should always be taken into consideration and indeed critically questioned is whether the participating institutions or their sponsors or funders aim to achieve or even require the utilisation of research results in a security-related context.

A further look at the Internet shows that many states see that a  serious security problem.