A UB exhibition numbers the sustainable development goals from the United Nations

The rector of the UB, Joan Elias, chaired the opening ceremony for the exhibition.
The rector of the UB, Joan Elias, chaired the opening ceremony for the exhibition.
Culture
(12/01/2018)

On January 11, the exhibition “Numbers and Humanity” was opened, and will be available until February 7 in the hall of the Historical Building of the University of Barcelona.

The rector of the UB, Joan Elias, chaired the opening ceremony for the exhibition.
The rector of the UB, Joan Elias, chaired the opening ceremony for the exhibition.
Culture
12/01/2018

On January 11, the exhibition “Numbers and Humanity” was opened, and will be available until February 7 in the hall of the Historical Building of the University of Barcelona.

The opening ceremony, which took place in Aula Magna was chaired by the rector of the UB, Joan Elias, who highlighted that “this exhibition is an example of what universities have to do: it makes us think and demands answers on the challenges of humanity. Therefore, it is an excellent reason to think”.

In his speech, the commissioner of the exhibition, Professor Javier Tejada, director of the Interdisciplinary Reflection Group and Math Solutions for Entities of the UB (GISME-UB), which launched this project, said that “humanity invented numbers and is now in the hands of numbers”, and regarding the exhibition, he highlighted that “this is a tribute to the number in real life”.

The exhibition highlights the role of numbers in all disciplines of the human knowledge, and it relates them to the content of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: hunger, health, education, gender equality, well-being, energy, work, innovation, inequalities, sustainability, ecosystem, peace and responsible consumption. “Understanding SDG-related numbers will allow us to know whether we will recognize each other in the future”, concluded Tejada.

In these lines, Àngel Pes, president of the Spanish Network of the UN World Compact, said that “sustainable development goals are the guideline to reach a better world by 2030. Itʼs humanityʼs agenda”, and congratulated the organizers of the exhibition.

 

“A tribute to the number in real life”

Numbers appeared 5,000 years ago, even before language and writing. Since then, humanity became a complex group of people whose behaviour are analysed through algorithms based on numeric data. The future of humanity, actually, depends on the numeric values in which the great doubts are expressed, and which are tightly related to their past, present and future.

The mobile exhibition, consists of twenty panels and 250 cartoons explaining the history of numbers since their conceptual and philosophical evolution until its symbolic representation in different cultures. It also goes through the different classical disciplines such as biology, physics, chemistry and psychology. On the other hand, there are counters that allow people see the number data progression which is relevant for humanity, such as population density, consumed water litres or numbers of deaths due hunger, and others such as the number of published books, tweets, pictures worldwide.

This exhibition has the collaboration from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the support of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), AGBAR Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, the Spanish Network of the World Compact for Sustainability, Rhode & Schwarz, Sentilo BCN (Barcelona City Council), IDAEA-CSIC, Esteyco Foundation and Volkswagen.