A hat tip to the Texas Board of Education and its consistent push to whitewash American education is necessary here. When you're presenting bios of mathematicians, you're teaching history, and there are some pretty alarming trends in how history is being taught:
http://www.houstonpress.com/news/5-reasons-the-new-texas-social-studies-textbooks-are-nuts-7573825The OP article is terrible and stupid, but it didn't emerge in a vacuum. It's a reaction to something very real, that has been going on for a very long time, that is terrible and stupid.
The real solution here is to identify that the Texas Board of Education is unqualified to make decisions, override them with national curriculum standards that are more firmly grounded in reality, and bring a more comprehensive approach to math history that acknowledges the outstanding contributions of the many cultures involved.
Funnily enough, we already have national math standards, so it should be pretty easy to pull off in this specific case. All we have to do is follow the process already in place to amend the standards.
