I've just finished "Inventing the Mathematician" by Sara N. Hottinger. It's about how we construct the idea of who can be a mathematician. I didn't need convincing, so I was hoping for some good ideas to counter the straight-white-male norm, which I sadly didn't find!

There was lots of "in the following chapter/section I will show ..." and "in the previous chapter I showed ...", which felt like it actually made the gist of the book harder to follow. My wife the sociology graduate says this is quite common, and it used to annoy her too.

The majority of the book is about mathematical 'subjectivity' - for those like me who don't know the way that word's used here, it's not the opposite of 'objectivity', it means "what kind of person we think about when we think about maths"

It's made me more aware of all the situations in which we reinforce a fairly exclusive idea of math subjectivity:

@NclNumbas * textbooks specifically aimed at girls and women help to include them as math subjects, never mind "girlification" - I *think* I already agreed with that
* for women, there's a tension between being 'feminine' and being 'mathematical', which is unnecessary

@NclNumbas That's made me think more about the contexts we use in exercises and examples: 'neutral' contexts are often coded more as 'male' than I had appreciated. We should more often use explicitly 'female' contexts.

The last couple of chapters, about mathematicians on postage stamps, and ethnomathematics, didn't do much for me. I'm not sure what the point was - just saying "lots of people see stamps, so that's an important factor shaping their impression of mathmos" would've done.

And I really didn't get the bit about ethnomathematics. She talks about how it's rooted in anthropology and all its colonialist baggage (no surprise), and gives a good example of a more reflective and collaborative study, but doesn't really offer ideas for how it should be done

Like, how *should* we incorporate maths outside the standard Western narrative in the story of maths?