The Webinar on What is Ethnomathematics? took place on Thursday, October 28th, 2021 from 2 pm until 3 pm, with Hilbert Blanco-Alvarez, Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Nariño in Colombia and Founding Director of the International Network of Ethnomathematics, as our invited speaker. This virtual event was free and open to the general public.
The invited speaker explained that human beings calculate depending on their culture and that Ubiratan D’Ambrosio defined ethnomathematics as the field of research that studies the processes of generation and creation of knowledge, its social and intellectual organization, and its transmission and diffusion. Hilbert Blanco-Alvarez highlighted the diversity of mathematical thinking and described how different cultures count with the body, with bones, with ropes making knots, with shells and with symbols that create their own system that represents the numbers. The speaker also recommended the Latin American Magazine of Ethnomathematics and the International Network of Ethnomathematics for more information on this topic.
