The Birthday of Rudyard Kipling (1865) — Mathematics of Empire and Censuses

Rudyard Kipling wrote about the British Empire, but his stories often touch on mathematics: the census in ‘Kim’ (the survey of India), the geography of maps, and the statistics of army logistics. The British Raj was administered with the help of mathematical surveys (the Great Trigonometric Survey of India) and population censuses (which began in 1871). Kipling’s father worked on the survey. Mathematics — through statistics and cartography — was a tool of imperial control, for good and ill. Kipling himself was suspicious of abstract mathematics, but his work is steeped in its consequences.