Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
Mathematics and the Dream We Share of Inner Peace and Solidarity
As a Brazilian child, my favorite topics were atlases: maps proved to be great
canvases for my imagination. My imaginary voyages took me to the center of the
earth, under the sea, and around the world in a hot air balloon. Jules Verne's topics
fascinated me from a very early age. Translated into Portuguese, the French writer's
adventure novels provided fantastic imagery for my own mental maps. Real trips
I took with my family in southern Brazil and in the United States, where we lived
from 1963 to 1968, gave me the idea of a dear home base. My simple question,
which guides most map-makers thus became: how do I get from here to there? From
my parents' to my grandmother's house? São Paulo city to Ubatuba beach? Rio de
Janeiro to Buenos Aires? Washington D. C. to New York? Imaginary maps I drew
with sticks on the sparkling white sands of Brazilian beaches reflected the realm
of my traveling possibilities. My very first map on paper was an engraving of our
home in College Park, Maryland, where my parents went to school. It was printed in
1967 at the University of Maryland where my mother studied Art History ( Fig. 1 ) .
My mother, Ilsa, went on to become an art teacher and museum curator, and my
father, Jorge, a theoretical physicist and philosopher. Both worked tirelessly toward
a philosophical understanding of the interplay between the beauty of art and the
creativity of science. My love for map-making and mathematics education grew out
of this remarkable but unlikely association between art, philosophy, and science. 1
Growing up on the Atlantic Coast in both South and North America made it easy
to orient myself up and down and sideways, too. I was sure I knew who I was and
where I was from. I knew when, where, and to whom I was born. My parents were
from Portuguese and German ancestry. I went from here to there to everywhere and
never got lost. The map of my existence was clearly laid out. The sun rose from the
East, across the ocean. West was where the sun disappeared behind the mountains.
North was up and South was down. Or so I thought until I arrived in central Brazil in
1978, at the young age of 19. Right then, on what used to be the Kuluene Indigenous
Reservation, everything changed dramatically.
In the state of Mato Grosso, literally meaning dense woods, there was no ocean, and
mountains and canyons were everywhere. Sunrise and sunset were always dimmed
by the smoking savannah, burnt by big farmers who cut trees and planted soybeans,
rice, and grass for cattle. North was no longer “up there” where I thought it belonged.
Going up meant the direction against which the rivers flow, that is, against the current.
Going downriver usually meant going North, because large rivers in central Brazil
generally run North, feeding into the tributaries of the Amazon River. The compass
my father Jorge gave me the day I left for Kuluene in 1978 was only useful the day I
used it to hit a spotted jaguar ( Pantera onca) in the head after the beast treed me for 8
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