History Of Math And Science

[steve_bank]

I had a book on math history and watched a show on the timelines of science leading into Europe, Newton, et al. The Christian Eurocentric view would say science and math popped up out of Christian Europe. The reality was that before Europe Persia and Arabia was the place to be for science and math. They had the wealth to support intellectual pursuits.

The Arabs produced the first comprehensive algebra text and developed the concept of zero. Before that written calculations could be ambiguous. Islam was not always opposed to science. They had optical manuscripts and elements of what we call Newton's Laws Of Motion.

Persian had one of the foremost astronomical observatories. It had dorms and meeting rooms. Persian data was used by Newton. A lot of material was in print going back in history at the time of Newton.

There is evidence the ancient Chinese had elements of linear algebra.

http://rhart.org/algebra/

The Romans did not have materials science, but understood structural beams and had empirical tables for strength of materials. They developed a water proof concrete.

 

[steve_bank]

The origins of calculus

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...-the-idea-that-gave-birth-to-modern-calculus/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal

 

[skepticalbip]

A little correction:
the Sumerians used a zero a few thousand years before the Arabs and it spread to India where the Arabs found it and brought it back to the middle east. The Mayans also had a zero and a base 20 number system. We still use the Sumerian base 60 number system a bit as in 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-origin-of-zer/

The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. There, a slanted double wedge was inserted between cuneiform symbols for numbers, written positionally, to indicate the absence of a number in a place (as we would write 102, the '0' indicating no digit in the tens column).

 

[steve_bank]

A little correction:
the Sumerians used a zero a few thousand years before the Arabs and it spread to India where the Arabs found it and brought it back to the middle east. The Mayans also had a zero and a base 20 number system. We still use the Sumerian base 60 number system a bit as in 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-origin-of-zer/

The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. There, a slanted double wedge was inserted between cuneiform symbols for numbers, written positionally, to indicate the absence of a number in a place (as we would write 102, the '0' indicating no digit in the tens column).

Good. Thanks

 

[PJPSYCO]

I had a book on math history and watched a show on the timelines of science leading into Europe, Newton, et al. The Christian Eurocentric view would say science and math popped up out of Christian Europe. The reality was that before Europe Persia and Arabia was the place to be for science and math. They had the wealth to support intellectual pursuits.

It is probably not as much Eurocentrism, but information access. Information is muddy in the text books because many of them are just playing a game of telephone. I would recommend reviewing ever older textbooks in a particular field. I have done this with chemistry and its sub fields, and have discovered that many of our modern textbooks are so disconnected from the literature which they are citing that they are a mess of strange disconnected and often incorrect information. It is not based in racism, but massive ignorance of field specific knowledge. At most I would say the attitude problem I've seen among professors is "old = bad". So, they don't read the classic literature, and have any idea what it does or doesn't say.