Keith Devlin kindly commented in his traditional column on my paper The truth/weapon duality of mathematics. Strongly recommend his post as well his previous one, How do you respond when you are asked to use your expertise to help your nation?
A quote from Devlin:
I received an email from a reader the UK (we have met, and occasionally exchange ideas) alerting me to a recently published paper by Alexandre Borovik, a retired mathematician from the University of Manchester (where I taught briefly back in the 1970s), titled The Tool/Weapon Duality of Mathematics and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Vol 16, Issue 1, January 2026.
Some of what Borovik writes is familiar to me, but he took his own reflections on working on projects with military relevance and extended them by researching the literature. It was his paper from which I took, not only the title for this post, but also the question quotation I began with. Those words were spoken by Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking to journalists and media executives from BRICS countries on 18 October 2024.
[Given that source, the current US government’s assault on universities and their slashing of research funds (all of which the UK government did in the 1980s when I was a casualty) seems particularly unwise. But again, we get the administration the People elect.]
I urge you to read Borovik’s paper. It’s a mere 24 pages long, plus five pages of highly useful references. It’s all highly relevant to American-based mathematicians today, some of whom will (assuming we remain a democracy and there is a change of government) undoubtedly find themselves facing a decision like the one I did back in the first decade of the 21st Century. Vladimir Putin was correct. And yes, I just wrote that. In an essay about mathematics.
I’ll end with a quotation from Borovik:
Mathematics, as we know it, was born as a weapon of subjugation and tyrannic control.
He brings the historical receipts to back up that statement. Though I was peripherally familiar with the historical events it refers to (particularly the beginnings of arithmetic in Sumeria over five thousand years ago, which I have written about in some of my books), the starkness of his assertion made me jolt. Facts have a habit of doing that.