The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Anthropology: Implications for What We Mean by Culture Dr. Dwight W. Read Department of Anthropology and Department of Statistics UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90095 Article Summary: In this presentation I discuss how Wigner’s observation about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” occurs in domains other than the natural sciences. In particular, I show how it applies where least expected, name- ly to cultural constructs such as the kinship terminologies that define and provide organization for the domain of kin in human societies. By a kinship terminology is meant the collection of kin terms we use in reference to those who are kin to us, such as the terms father, mother, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, father-in-law, and so on, for English speakers. The “received view” of kin terms is that they are names for categories of genealogical relations established, presumably, for a variety of reasons, depending on the particular society. Indeed, the kin terms uncle and aunt in English correspond to the category of genealogical relations given by parent’s sibling or parent’s sibling’s spouse. However, both those who are identified as kin and the domain to which kin terms are applicable is much broader than just genealogical relations. In some societies, kin relations are established through the naming of a child, for example. Kin terms are organized in the form of a system of relations and the cultural knowledge embedded in that system of relations makes it possible to compute kinship relations directly from kin terms. Like the counting numbers that repre- sent the size of collections of objets, and where the natural numbers provide a way to do computations with the counting numbers symbolically through a formal system we refer to as arithmetic, the kin terms making up a kinship terminology have a similar logic that enables calculations of kin relations to be done symboli- cally with the kinship terminology system. For example, when an English speak- er refers to someone as uncle and that person, in turn refers to yet another person as son, the speaker knows that he or she may properly refer to the latter person as cousin; that is, the kin term product of son and uncle is cousin, which we can ex- press by the equation son of uncle = cousin. The kin term product equation makes explicit a relation among the kin terms son, uncle and cousin that is part of the cultural knowledge English speakers have regarding their kinship terminology. 1