Thanks.
Is it not more realistic to have stated from the onset what is now emerging as the facts of the case that, ''I can't substantiate the claim that opens the description of my talk but I identify with it. I expect more light may be shed on this idea at the seminar''?
One of the challenges to the struggle to decolonize the globally dominant Western academy is that too often the decolonizing process is marked by uncritical or inadequately critical multicultural thinking.
30 mins to one hour on Google is enough to disprove that claim that computer algorithms are based on African fractals.
Its also enough to learn that that claim cannot be true because the conditions for it to be true do not exist in the first place and no amount of argument will bring them into existence.
The closest relationship between African fractals and computation may be seen as binary logic, which was developed or decisively developed by Leibnitz as part of Western mathematics in the 17th century, by which time the West had no access to African fractals.
Leibniz knew about Chinese I Ching binaries because they had been communicated to him through the long written textual tradition of I Ching while such African examples as Ifa and its affiliates, such as the Dahomean Fa, the Igbo Afa and the Edo/Benin Oguega were first rendered in writing in the 20th century.
Or can the argument be invoked that another African example of fractals influenced computing by the time of the 20th century entry of these African knowledge systems to the West? Is there any development in the history of computing whose history is not readily verifiable leading to claims of being able to uncover some new facts hidden by biased scholars?
The study of African fractals is a heavily developed field as a simple Google search will show. Its contours and verified claims are clear. Its vital we understand this configuration.
--Toyin,You are completely mistaken about the authorship of the quotation that you are disputing. The scholarly thing to do is to attend the seminar and the organizers will explain to you why they made the claim that you are attributing to me. My abstract is very clear and specific but I do not doubt the claim of the organizers.Come to the seminar and you may be better educated about African contributions to computer science. You may also have something to teach the organizers. It is the banking concept of education that expects the teacher to have all the answers and the students to be blank slates, according to Freire. The students who organized the seminar have posed a problem that you find perplexing but I think that it is a valid claim. Come to the seminar and get some knowledge if you want or come and share your expert knowledge.I am sure that the audience will benefit from hearing your take too. They may even invite you to a future seminar to provide the counter-thesis to my thesis for a future synthesis. That is how knowledge grows for those with a growth mind-set. Those who claim to know it all do not grow in knowledge. Done know don't know.BikoOn Saturday, 8 May 2021, 17:55:50 GMT-4, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:Oga Biko,Thanks.You opened your seminar description with an assertion that cannot be substantiated.If you can't substantiate it now is it then that you will substantiate it?
Anybody with a knowledge of computing history knows the assertion is not true.
I have acknowledged that the rest of the seminar description is impressive but that non-factual assertion with which it opens is not helpful.
Thankstoyin--On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 22:45, bikozino via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:Thanks Toyin for raising these important questions. You should attend the seminar and raise them for the Mathematics students to answer if I can't.There is no need to seek to dispute a seminar that you have not yet heard. It is not scholarly to think that you know everything, that is fatalistic. Come to the seminar with an open mind and you could learn something new and you could also teach other participants what you know during the discussion.Your question about why Africa is lagging in computer science is the easiest to answer. Research and development funding in this area was led by governments and not by individuals. Your guess is as good as mine why African governments dropped the ball.Biko--On May 8, 2021 4:35 PM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:--Oga Biko,
You are still avoiding the question.
The question is
''Is there evidence that computer algorithms are based on African fractals?''
If you believe the evidence exists, present it and tell us where to go to verify your claim.
You and I know that's how it's done in scholarship, not trying to divert attention from the question by invoking other issues such as claiming someone is saying Africans did not contribute to modern computing, nor demanding that one go and read Diop who does not discuss computing.
Eglash' African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design does not suggest your claim by it's title or subtitle.
He argues for correspondences, not claims of influence, direct or even indirect, between African fractals and modern computing.
Diop has nothing to say about computing in his chapter 16, on Africa's contribution to the sciences, as evident from his book as available from that link.
Would you want to reference anywhere in African Mathematics where Bangura makes the same claim you are making, and if he does, why you think the claim is valid? From what I have read in the book, I would be surprised by Bangura making such a claim. He seems too careful for that.
It's also not true that similarities between older and newer ideas and applications necessarily qualify as copyright infringement in intellectual property law.
To make such a case, you have to have grounds for arguing that the later developer of the idea had access to the earlier idea before developing their own and that this earlier idea is sufficiently distinctive and non-generic to be classified as intellectual property.
First, I doubt if there is any evidence that the West knew about African fractals before the advent of modern computing.
What they knew about was binary systematisation of knowledge from the Chinese I Ching and Leibnitz is described as stating he had developed the idea before encountering the I Ching.
Even then, binary organisation and perhaps even fractal order may be better understood as generic organisation systems fundamental to human thought on account of the role of duality in structuring biological and cognitive reality, male/ female, young/old, good/ bad, right/left, day/night, cold/wet etc, a system the foundations of which are evident in I Ching, Yoruba Ifa, Yoruba Ogboni, Jewish Kabbala, all these being philosophical/spiritual systems whose cosmologies use similar binary typologies, relating the
male/female, left side/right side dynamic to foundational frameworks for understanding cosmic order and dynamism.
Some of the richest fractal geometries- one aspect of which is repetition of forms on increasingly smaller scales such that the smaller may be integrated within the larger- are Hindu yantra geometries, of unknown age, demonstrating through geometric order a similar strategy of repetition in scales of descent from a superordinate form, as also evident in Ifa, such that the first unit of Ifa Odu, the organisational system of Ifa, known as Eji Ogbe, provides the structure from which the entire structure of 256 odu is derived so that the entire 256 may be seen as encapsulated in Eji Ogbe.
So, fractal design and binary organisation, as used in information organisation,, evident in I Ching and Kabbalah, employed in terms correlative with fractal order in such systems as Ifa, may be understood as a globally widespread phenomenon, emerging at very old periods and at different times and places.
We need to be careful about our manner of trying to place Africa on the table of scientific achievement.
The computer scientist who makes explicit conjunctions between his work and both patterns in nature and African abstract arts such as patterns on mats, if I recall his examples correctly, is Philip Emeagwali, a person who needs to be properly contextualized as both genius in computing, adept in selling claims of achievements he did not make and beautiful at describing his methods of developing his computing designs.
He does these in his iconic interview with the Nigerian Guardian journalist Reuben Abati, an article rich in celebration of both factual and fictional scientific achievements superbly and unforgettably described and later illustrated with superb full color illustrations in the publication of the interview on his website, strategies of fact and fiction that must have inspired many people including African computer scientists, and people like me in the humanities who, when I read that interview on its first publication, cut out the pages of the interview from the paper and folded them into my wallet so it could follow me everywhere, or some similar venerational strategy.
Having unmasked Emeagwali's fictions, we need to recognise his genuine achievements, one of which is his description of his deriving inspiration from visualization and the arts of the low technology environment he grew up in as a means of developing computing systems, ideas that suggest similar possibilities for people outside high tech environments and pointing to the field of Natural Computing, developing computational ideas from nature perhaps before that field was developed or when it was still emergent and the possibility of developing computing skills by studying fractals in indigenous arts. A book needs to be written on Philip Emeagwali in his various facets and their unity.
thanks
toyin
On Sat, May 8, 2021, 17:32 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:--Toyin,What is the subtitle of the book by Eglash? See also Abdul Bangura, African Mathematics. And see chapter 16 of Civilization or Barbarism by Diop. Why do you believe that Africans made no contributions to modern computer engineering? Do you have any evidence of the null hypothesis?In intellectual property law, what you saw as similarities would be enough evidence for the finding of copyrights infringement. Epistemic piracy is a real thing and it is on-going.BikoOn Saturday, 8 May 2021, 12:12:51 GMT-4, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:Oga Biko,
Thanks.I am worried by the way you are handling this issue.The description of your talk on fractals is superb but that non-factual assertion that opens it does not help at all.Clearly, you have no evidence that-' the computer engineering algorithms that power the Internet are based on complex African fractal designs common in structures built by African men, and cornrow hair designs pioneered by African women hundreds of years ago on the continent and in the diaspora''For that assertion to be factual, there would have to be incontrovertible evidence that the creators of computer algorithms, at the inception of this technology, adapted African fractal designs.
To the best of my knowledge, such evidence does not exist.
I dont expect even Ron Eglash, the pioneer and perhaps foremost authority on the subject of African fractals, their relationship to science and to fractal geometry in other cultures, would make such an assertion, as evident from his book African Fractals, his website, and other essays where he continues his publications on the subject.
The more realistic assertion may be framed thus-''Did you know that the computer engineering algorithms that power the Internet are similar to complex African fractal designs common in structures built by African men, and cornrow hair designs pioneered by African women hundreds of years ago on the continent and in the diaspora?''From that realistic and possibly factual assertion one could then proceed to demonstrate these similarities and reflect on their implications.
Such reflections could include questions of how to cultivate skills in computing by studying such designs.One could also reflect on the universal recurrence of similar cognitive forms across the world and the question of why different civilizations have developed these cognitive forms in different ways.One could ask why Africa did not develop advanced technology even though it developed its own versions of cognitive forms that underlie computing, such as the binary organization of knowledge, as in the Ifa system of knowledge, a point made clear since Olu Longe's ''Ifa Divination and Computer Science,'' and taken further in various studies after Longe's as a Google search for the subject will demonstrate.In exploring that question, one would also need to note that other cultures also developed similar cognitive forms before the West, as Eglash demonstrates on fractal geometry on his website.
The correlations between binary organization in the Chinese I Ching divination system and computer science are even better known and have been more often written about than the Ifa/science conjunctions, a correlation between I Ching and mathematical systems that seems to have been made famous by German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century.
One account, such as this fine article by Damien Walter on the ancient history of binary coding, sees the I Ching as the source of Leibnitz's binary code, while another, such as this one, quoting a letter from Leibnitz, argues that he had already developed his system before discovering the Chinese example, which then reinforced his confidence in his invention, leading to the conclusion from this view that ''By seeing binary representation in ancient texts, Leibniz was compelled to continue his own writing of binary systems. This, in turn, became the language of modern computing still being used today, thus linking a 5,000-year-old text to the formation of the digital age.'
On the impact of his work in binary organization, the Wikipedia article on Leibnitz states, ''He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of nearly all digital (electronic, solid-state, discrete logic) computers, including the Von Neumann architecture, which is the standard design paradigm, or "computer architecture", followed from the second half of the 20th century, and into the 21st.''Peter J. Lu ( Wikipedia article rich with links to discussions of his work) and Paul J. Steinhardt became famous through demonstrating relationships between the Islamic architectural patterns known as Giri Tiles and the modern advanced fractal geometry represented by Penrose Tiling ( both very rich Wikipedia links) in their paper "Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture'', which can be read at that link along with responses to the paper by other scientists while Sebastian Prange's ''The Tiles of Infinity,'' examines the subject for the general reader.
The authors of Indra's Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein on the beautifully complex mathematical patterns first ''glimpsed'' in modern times by Felix Klein open their book by demonstrating relationships between these fractal patterns and the famous Buddhist image of the Net of Indra, thereby describing Klein as rediscovering in mathematics 'an idea from Asian mythology', as the Amazon page of the book puts it.
These correlations give further urgency to the question of why the West took the lead with advanced technologies employing related ideas while African, Asian and Islamic cultures had earlier developed the basics of these ideas. The Western ascendancy might be due to a unique convergence of cultural and economic factors. I expect that a significant degree of published work exists on the development of science in various cultures that can help such an enquiry.You continue with another assertion that is more obfuscatory than factual-''Science does not always rely on conclusive evidence. Rather the testing and retesting of hypotheses are the guides to original contributions to knowledge.''Conclusive evidence may be described as the destination of the scientific journey. The testing and retesting of hypotheses is a central method in the quest for such evidence. Where such conclusive evidence is found or developed, the reasons why it should be understood as conclusive are clearly spelt out for all to see and respond to. Where the evidence is not conclusive, the same applies.
Where what was seen as conclusive at a point in time is to be understood as no longer so, the reasons are also spelt out for all to see and respond to.In this instance, not only is the question asked about computing algorithms being based on African designs not a question in science, but is a question in the history of science, but even then requires a statement of justification, the provision of evidence on which that justification is based, and the analysis of that evidence demonstrating why it should be understood in terms of the interpretation provided.
You have not provided such evidence talk less analyzing it to demonstrate its validity for your claim.
You then invoke a claim of denigration of African achievement in order to anchor your inability to provide evidence for a non-factual assertion you should not have made in the first place-''Anyone who claims that Africans have made no contribution to civilization should keep testing that null hypothesis''The issue is not about the general subject of African contributions to civilization but the specific claim that ''the computer engineering algorithms that power the Internet are based on complex African fractal designs common in structures built by African men, and cornrow hair designs pioneered by African women hundreds of years ago on the continent and in the diaspora''
Your trying to avoid verifying your claim by invoking anti-African bias does not suggest the critical culture that should define scholarship.
You then reinforce those disturbing assertions by quoting well meaning but extremist and self defeating Negritudist rhetoric -''Cesaire found such claims to be absurd and proclaimed 'hurray to those who invented nothing' for they remain human and deserving of equal dignity''Africans certainly deserve equal dignity but the notion that Africans invented nothing, in various aspects of civilization and perhaps even in science, is a fiction and actually works against the dignity Cesaire wishes to claim flor Africans.
You conclude on another assertion that is made problematic by the problematic assertions that preceded it, casting doubt on whatever validity it might have, a validity that I for one wonder what its range really is-''African inventions are enormous but are stolen or denigrated''Such assertions are at times used as an umbrella for various unsustainable claims of African achievement.
It would be helpful to have some striking examples of these ''enormous'' achievements that have been stolen or, at this point in history, are still denigrated.
Why are these issues important?
They are important because the limitations of logic evident in your assertion and defense of that assertion help to fuel anti-African bias where science is concerned.You are a scholar of international repute publicly making such assertions that may motivate some Africans or Black people to feel good but which can readily be shown to be non-factual. If you, with your level of education and professional achievement, can fall into that trap, what message could that send about others in your racial demographic who are not so developed or accomplished?thankstoyin--On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 01:37, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:--Toyin,Science does not always rely on conclusive evidence. Rather the testing and retesting of hypotheses are the guides to original contributions to knowledge. Anyone who claims that Africans have made no contribution to civilization should keep testing that null hypothesis even after Cesaire found such claims to be absurd and proclaimed 'hurray to those who invented nothing' for they remain human and deserving of equal dignity, especially so when African inventions are enormous but are stolen or denigrated.BikoOn Friday, 7 May 2021, 18:07:51 GMT-4, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:beautiful.but how true is this-''Did you know that the computer engineering algorithms that power the Internet are based on complex African fractal designs common in structures built by African men, and cornrow hair designs pioneered by African women hundreds of years ago on the continent and in the diaspora?''Is there conclusive evidence to this effect?toyin--On Fri, 7 May 2021 at 13:27, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:--
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