ABSTRACT
We use the chapter of Nancy Shelley as our epilogue for it leads us to reflect how mathematics might look in the final phase of reform. Beginning from the assumption that we all carry with us a measure of reality which derives from the culture of western mathematics, Nancy Shelley stimulates us to imagine a mathematics which is not dominated by the experience of white men. She challenges the power of form and authority by adopting a non-traditional writing style. She calls to her aid T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets in seeking to summon those realities she wants to acknowledge. She asks fundamental questions about the status of knowledge and how it is culturally influenced, the epistemological status of issues in mathematics and mathematics teaching such as the role and function of absolutes, prediction, otherness, authority, objectivity. Describing her early experience of male domination in mathematics education, she makes a strong plea for challenging the relation of mathematics to war and calls for the necessity to fight for peace. She closes with a vision of a different mathematics, which grows out of a culture which has no pretension to dominance, which affirms humanness, and which relies on a culture of relationship, care and communion. According to Shelley the process by which it will grow is known, but the shape it will take remains to be determined.
