ACADEMIA Letters

Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution

of the Brain Lateralization
Luigi Borzacchini, University of Bari, Accademia Pugliese delle Scienze. Italy

In a recent paper on Academia Letters (Borzacchini), I wrote about the ‘historical scale’ of
the breathtaking evolution of mathematics (sometimes an epochal and diffused revolution in
a few decades!): it was difficult to ascribe it to an evolution of the brain, the hardware —
evolution would be too slow! —, and it was just as difficult to read it as a simple evolution
of ideas, the software — the changes would be too ephemeral and personal! My thesis was
that the scale of such historical evolution could be successfully explained as the evolution of a
midware, the actual architectural arrangement of the brain as it is constituted in the first years
of the child’s life.
Furthermore, this hypothesis could be refined to read the evolution of mathematics as
related to the evolution of the Brain Lateralization (BL) and the relationship between the
two hemispheres: Left (LH: linguistic, analytic, syntactic) and Right (RH: holistic, iconic,
spatial) (Springer and Deutsch).
A premise: I fear that, with regard to the characteristics of the BL, it is also difficult to find
a lexicon to describe it. My option is simple: to delineate it only in reference to mathematical
knowledge, so that the two hemispheres’ working essentially reduced to iconic (RH) and
syntactic (LH) representations.
These are the two classic types of representation: the first based on the similarity between
the things and their icons, the second based on syntactic rules, connecting arbitrary signs and
simulating the relationships between the represented things. These are the ancient Aristotelian
aspects in the category of quantity: discrete (order, integers, writing) and continuous (figures,
flow, speaking).
Usually in the literature I have found references to the prevalence of one hemisphere over
the other. In my opinion, however, the most relevant aspect in the history of mathematics

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Luigi Borzacchini, luigiborzacchini47@gmail.com

Citation: Borzacchini, L. (2021). Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution of the Brain
Lateralization. Academia Letters, Article 3575. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3575.

1
is the evolution of their cooperation, which characterizes mathematical intelligence as the
symbiosis between iconic and syntactic representation — the first more typical of geom-
etry, the second of arithmetic — and the emergence of the most important concepts of
mathematics.
Four millennia of Mathematics would mimic neither ‘Darwinian evolution’ nor ‘intellec-
tual chronicle’: Julian Jaynes read in these terms the emergence of “consciousness”. For
mathematics, the growing role of the LH could be characterized by the evolution of symbolic
arithmetic and algebra: symbolswill become syntactic ‘signs’ only in the LH.
UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS, ACCORDING TO BL.
1. BEFORE THE GREEKS, fluent speaking and discrete writing were two distinct
worlds: the first for common life, the second in the temple and in the palace. There was
probably no clear cognitive aspect in BL, and for writing the iconic presentation was the
most natural — no syntactic reasoning! —, as in pictographic writing.
Even the number in primitive populations (until the figurate numbers of the Pythagorean)
had a qualitative and iconic character, and was concrete and cardinal. Paleo-Babylonian al-
gebra also had a clear geometric character (Hoyrup): the abacus was the common medium
of geometry, arithmetic and algebra, with no distinction between ’discrete’ and ’continuous’.
Visual evidence was the base of geometric reasoning, and any “proof” was just a geometric
construction.
2. After the alphabetic revolution, speaking and writing merged into language, discrete,
no longer fluent and continuous as in the voice, migrating to the LH with a potentially infinite
external memory due to the writing: the finite state automaton turned into a Turing machine:
this epochal computational change was perhaps the origin of the Greek Miracle. Only the
musical aspects remained in the RH.
Interlude: In the child the idea of “abstract number” derives from the coordination be-
tween cardinal (synchronous, set-based and visual) and ordinal (diachronic, time-scanned and
ordered) (Piaget and Szeminska). The alphabetic revolution imposed the coordination of this
bipolarity, and even the connection between numbers and letters.
The LH began to take on new specific syntactic characters, where we find the emergence
of logic: the Aristotelian syllogism was the syntactic translation of physical causality, and the
Euclidean proof was the written version of the oral geometric construction: its being always
associated with a (often useless) figure shows another example of symbiosis in the BL. This
LH specialization faced a similar RH specialization in the perception of space: not only in
Greek art, but also in geometric modeling (Anaximander map, Eudoxus geometric model of
the skies)
3. IN THE MIDDLE AGES we find the prevalence of the LH: Bible meant the Book

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Luigi Borzacchini, luigiborzacchini47@gmail.com

Citation: Borzacchini, L. (2021). Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution of the Brain
Lateralization. Academia Letters, Article 3575. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3575.

2
andQuran meantthe Lecture: the written text took the ancient place of physis, with the re-
jection of any cognitive role for images (Byzantine iconoclasm and Islamic prohibition of
images). In Islamic mathematics, we read the beginning of algorithmic mathematics with
the syntactic evolution of algebra and the symbolism of Indo-Arabic numerals.
4. The deep core of the prevalence of the LH was the algebraic sign, which began its
irresistible career in the LATE MIDDLE AGES, along with the idea of algorithm: no algo-
rithm without signs, no sign without algorithms. A new symbiosis between the hemispheres
appeared in the erosion of the ancient contrast between discrete and continuous. Discrete
measures became common in describing continuous quantities: speed of a ship through nodes,
temperature through colors, music through discrete neumes on parallel lines, time through
clocks, and economic relations were founded on the monetization of value. Science turned
from a reflection of nature into a discourse about nature. Learning in Medieval European
universities was based on lecturae and quaestiones.
5. The crisis of this symbolic prevalence of the LH characterizes the RENAISSANCE,
when the RH took over, with the triumph of the figurative arts, architecture, and design. The
RH increasingly specialized in artistic activities with the reproduction of perceived reality,
such as perspective, technical drawing, anatomical and botanical tables. Leonardo da Vinci
witnessed this triumph.
In this radical upheaval a deep change affected the LH: symbolic algebra appeared in the
linguistic universe, and it was the first artificial universal formal language, the seed of the
thousands of future formal scientific languages.
6. The SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION was the result of an epoch-making new symbiosis
between the two hemispheres, the main results of which were the ideas of ’real number’,
a number and a magnitude, and the ’symbolic algebra’. ’Real number’ appeared almost
simultaneously in Galileo’s kinematics, Stevin’s arithmetic and Descartes’ analytic geometry.
The full acceptance of the idea of actual infinity (transfinite) made possible this emergence:
the LH as a Turing machine dealt with the continuum algorithmically in a syntactic framework.
Algebra transformed its ancient geometric form into a new symbolic one, and in Descartes
we find the translation of geometry into an algebraic form. However, he wrote his mechanics
in a geometric language, and never represented it in an algebraic language! The same for
Newton, even though he was the ‘father’ of calculus. The symbiosis will be completed in the
following century.
7. We must wait until the 18th CENTURY for the beginning of a new period of preva-
lence for the LH. The calculus began written in a geometric language (‘mechanics’ was a
geometria de motu, the ‘derivative’ was the tangent and the ‘integral’ the area), but was later
translated into an algebraic language. The language of physics became more and more alge-

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Luigi Borzacchini, luigiborzacchini47@gmail.com

Citation: Borzacchini, L. (2021). Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution of the Brain
Lateralization. Academia Letters, Article 3575. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3575.

3
braic, definitively with Lagrange.
8. Kant tried to preserve a balance between LH and RH, but the 19th CENTURY marked
the prevalence of the LH. Geometry lost its central role in mathematics, replaced by algebra:
it was the so-called arithmetization of analysis. Mathematics became syntax, physics became
semantics, and geometry increasingly linked to physics.
Euclid’s demonstration had been the paradigm of reason since ancient times, and geome-
try had always been strongly founded on intuition: without these two pillars, the question of
the foundations of mathematics arose. Logicism, formalism, intuitionism were the classic
answers, and they were always syntactic or logical or arithmetic foundations, that is, founda-
tions in the LH.
By the turn of the century, philosophy of mathematics had lost its mental and visual foun-
dations. After this “oblivion of the mind”, science has been reduced to the relationship be-
tween mathematics/logic as syntactic tools and experimental practice, linked by semantic
interpretation and syntactic representation. Mathematical logic, set theory and theory of al-
gorithms theoretically characterized the new syntactic framework.
9. Since ancient times, syntactic reasoning had always included two sharply different
LH basic skills: computation and formal logic. BETWEEN 19th AND 20th CENTURY,
mathematical logic (from Boole to Frege) and algorithmic calculation (from Babbage to Tur-
ing) began to merge: it was the birth of computer science.
Theoretically this is a process that goes back to Leibniz, and involves the emergence of the
absolute and stable character of the idea of ‘the computable’, the new LH universe, whose
crisis was marked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
Historically it marks the ‘realm of signs’, with an economy ruled by finance and credit
cards, where all the relations are just handling of signs, and we are just a bunch of pins,
personal codes, passwords, QR-codes.
10. What about the end of the 20TH CENTURY? With user-friendly languages and
WIMP technology (windows, icons, mouse, pointers) we encounter the contrast between a
completely syntactic nature of the computer and an immediate, spatial and visual competence
of its common users.
The LH appears dominant in the world of technological and scientific professions. The
RH appears dominant among the people, with the increasing use of icons and emoticons in
messages, and with the widespread disaffection for learned reading and writing.
In the 21st century, does the natural language return to the RH?
Could this reconstruction help mathematical learning? One last question: where does
this BL dynamic come from? What are its causes? My answer is always: “The truth about
mathematics cannot be said or shown, but it can be told in its history”.

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Luigi Borzacchini, luigiborzacchini47@gmail.com

Citation: Borzacchini, L. (2021). Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution of the Brain
Lateralization. Academia Letters, Article 3575. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3575.

4
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HØYRUP, J. (2002). Lengths, widths, surfaces. Springer, New York
JAYNES, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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PIAGET, J. and SZEMINSKA, A. (1941). La genese du nombre chez l’enfant. Delachaux
& Niestlè. Neuchatel.
SPRINGER, S.P. and DEUTSCH, G. (1981). Left brain, right brain. W.H.Freeman and
co., San Francisco

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Luigi Borzacchini, luigiborzacchini47@gmail.com

Citation: Borzacchini, L. (2021). Historical phenomenology of mathematics and evolution of the Brain
Lateralization. Academia Letters, Article 3575. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3575.