Dead white guys DIDN'T come up with an easy-to-use numeric system - dead brown guys did. And the concept of "zero" was invented independently in brown India and red-brown Mayan Central America.

Oh yes, and the same group of dead brown guys who came up with the numerals we now use also came up with - and named - algebra (from the Arabic "al-jabbr", "putting together").

When does ideology cross the line into psychosis?

other terms in mathematics, most prominently "algorithm" -- a corruption of the name of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (who lived in Persia, but wrote in Arabic), the man who wrote down a collection of step-by-step methods for solving for unknown quantities, in his book The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, or in Arabic, Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala;.

You might notice in that Arabic title, "al-ğabr", which is in fact the exact phrase that evolved, entirely and only because of its appearance in the title of this work, into our word, "algebra". Al-khwarizmi's book is also credited with introducing to the western world the Arabic system of decimal representation. Amusingly, considering the ethnic implications of the professor's surname, the Spanish word for "digit" is Guarismo. Perhaps she should be denouncing Islamic privilege, which among other things would fit more neatly with the actual history of "Western" mathematics and science, both of which were set back incalculably by the genocidal purge of the Moors (who, by the way, were historically more Berber than Arab, a distinction lost on most people, but of acute significance to Berbers) from Iberia in the 15th century.

The whole story reads like something out of the Onion, but if it's all true, and she's not being taken out of context, the professor is an idiot of exquisite proportion. Perhaps she imagines that African American students would find themselves less under-privileged if they were placed in classrooms, with or without Caucasian students, where mathematics is taught entirely in Swahili.

I'm just wondering how any of this advances knowledge?

Not a bit. In fact it favors tearing apart fundamental concepts in order to make an immediate profit in attention and cash.

It's the academic disaster capitalism. Blow up the infrastructure and sell it CHEAP.

who smacked me in the face during class because she was frustrated with another student (and I was a bit out of line).

She tried to tell me that Latin was a derivative language of French.

And yes, she WAS a complete nutter.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I suspect the folks reporting it might.
Fox news sorts love to belittle college professors and political correctness. Latina woman professor talking about POC and whiteness? You betcha.

And yeah, I get it, math is math. Facts are facts.

But. But, why is it that many girls in our culture have it communicated to them at a very early age that physics, for example, is something that boys are better at? I'm a scientist, a faculty member at a large state school in a liberal town. My daughter nonetheless somehow got this virus in middle school. She thought somehow that she couldn't be as good at math and physics as her male peers. A wonderful high-school physics teacher cured her by really inviting in young women and teaching the nerdy boys that they weren't "all that". She was a physics major in college.
Do you think it is possible that our culture communicates negative things to POC about their possibilities for success? Sure, I know of Neil DeGrass Tyson, but does this mean that there is not room for improvement in how Math and Science is taught?
And, by the way. I'm male and a scientist. I've seen a lot of sexism in science. Thankfully, the good old boys network is slowly losing power, at least where I am.

Amazing Aztecs Were Math Whizzes Too

The type of mathematics the Aztecs used to calculate land holdings seems to be consistent with their calendar mathematics, which are more well-known, Williams said.

"This fits very nicely with the mathematics we are more familiar with, which is the mathematics of calendrics," Williams said. "They coordinated the solar calendar with the lunar calendar with Venus cycles. They did it proportionally, one cycle with another."

The ability to make calculations using proportions was widespread across cultures by that time.

"The Maya had this also," Williams said. "Also we see it in the counting of people and objects. This all fits in very nicely."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/2427-amazing-aztecs-mat...

even a cursory look at history of mathematics shows chinese and indians had pi calciulated to great accuracy long before greeks.

also knotted 3-4-5 loops at building sites prove egyptians understood at least that case of pythagorean theorem. used loop to make right angles in construction.
plus the pythagorean school drew from many sources,iirc.

I fear Ms. Gutierrez is just gonna have to live with Archimedes.