January 31, 2026
When proofs meet pitchforks
Naples' 1790s civil war was intensified by moral panic over Real Analysis (2023)
Math Panic in Old Naples: Was it numbers—or anti‑French vibes? Commenters erupt
TLDR: A history essay claims Naples’ 1790s turmoil included a backlash against French “modern math,” arguing numbers and politics were tightly linked. Commenters fire back, split between “math is neutral” skeptics and “math is power” believers, turning a dusty chapter into a lively culture-war debate over what math really means.
Did a math style choice really help inflame a civil war? LARB’s piece says French-occupied Naples around 1800 freaked out over “very modern mathematics” (think algebra-heavy calculus), while local scholars rallied around old-school, ruler-and-compass geometry. The author argues math wasn’t neutral; stricter, “rigorous” methods became political scaffolding for a return to order after revolution. Cue the comments: andrewflnr blasts the essay as fuzzy on “what math is,” saying it blurs belief and logic. bawolff claims it’s just anti-French vibes dressed up as theory—culture war with triangles.
Then zozbot234 storms in with receipts, calling the “reactionary” label “copium” and dropping links about synthetic mathematics. arduanika chimes in with a sighing “War often pushes people to the limit,” which instantly becomes a meme under screenshots of Euclid wielding a pitchfork. The thread splits into Team Math-Is-Neutral vs Team Math-Is-Political, with jokes about Napoleonic “algorithm updates” and a “Euclid vs Calculus” cage match. Underneath the humor, readers wrestle with a big question: do tools shape power, or just reflect it? Whatever the answer, the real fight tonight is in the comments, where history class meets subreddit snark—and nobody agrees where the line between numbers and nations really lies.
Key Points
- •The essay argues mathematics and politics were deeply intertwined in French-occupied Naples around 1800.
- •It claims a new, rigor-focused mathematics emerged as a response to stabilizing social order after the French Revolution.
- •In 1806, the French army occupied the Kingdom of Naples, aiming to build a centralized administrative monarchy with a liberal economy.
- •A dominant Neapolitan synthetic school (late 1790s–1830s) favored synthetic geometry as the secure foundation of mathematics.
- •Neapolitan mathematicians distrusted modern French analysis—algebraized infinitesimal calculus detached from Euclidean geometry—despite its practical applications.