Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999) • Hacker News Board

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#71

Post by vinay427 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:48 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #65

et-al wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

namirez's point is that the historical people mentioned are Persians being called Arabs. And there are Persians that would take offense to this association.

> And there are Persians that would take offense to this association. Believe me, it's the same here in North-Africa and Arabs are really loathed. But again, it's a nomination that's often mistaken for an ethnicity.

Much of North Africa is considered part of the Arab world today, as it often refers to places where a dialect of Arabic is spoken and the culture has been affected in parallel. This is a key difference as Persian isn't even considered to be in the same language family as Arabic, unlike the dialects of Arabic that are predominant in the region approximately spanning Morocco to Egypt.

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#72

Post by ptah » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:52 AM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #70

ptah wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean Iranian right? "Persian" is a colonial term

While you are correct in that it is an exonym, it's not exactly what I, and I assume many others today, would think of when you say "colonial." The origin of the word dates back to thousands of years ago when no present government or society existed. For those who would like to read a little more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Iran

from your link: "In the Western world, Persia (or one of its cognates) was historically the common name for Iran"

so I will stick to saying colonial as it accurately points to the western world as opposed to Africa or Asia for example

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#73

Post by dragandj » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #37

yters wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also heard that Allah is a variant of Elohim, and was used by Christians in the region before being conquered by the Muslims.

Muslims people believe in the Christian/Hebrew single God indeed. They just think that the right way to do it is through Mohammed (The muslim prophet) teaching. The argument is that Mohammed is the last prophet that god sent and thus should be the one to follow.

They seem to be wrong about that “last” prophet thing, since everybody knows about Joseph Smith, who came after Monammed.

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#74

Post by vinay427 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

ptah wrote: post #72

vinay427 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are correct in that it is an exonym, it's not exactly what I, and I assume many others today, would think of when you say "colonial." The origin of the word dates back to thousands of years ago when no present government or society existed. For those who would like to read a little more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Iran

from your link: "In the Western world, Persia (or one of its cognates) was historically the common name for Iran" so I will stick to saying colonial as it accurately points to the western world as opposed to Africa or Asia for example

I don't disagree about the name that should be used, as I said. I just think calling it colonial needs a little more context for people who would not unreasonably assume it's something more similar to Western colonialism of India or something.

On that note, "India"/Hindustan/Hindu/etc. are somewhat similarly colonial-rooted names, ironically popularized by the Iranians.

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#75

Post by acqq » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54

acqq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Christian god is nameles Inherited from what developed as a norm in Judaism, where the name existed but then stopped being read (the most famous "one who must not be named"), but the original name of the deity is preserved in the given names used around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophoric_name#Yahweh

For the theophoric names, I have a question you probably can't answer. I've read that the form "Jehovah" results from reading YHWH as if it had the vowel points of the word adonai, "lord". But I can't help noticing that the prefix form of YHWH in names, for which the vowels are known, is yeho-. That really adds some credibility to "Jehovah", except that "Jehovah" supposedly comes from a completely unrelated conventio…

"How true" of course depends on the faith of the one who discusses it -- the faiths are exactly made based on the different "stories" about the same topics, which the believers have to believe. It appears to me that the relevant research behind "1906 Jewish Encyclopedia":

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11305-names-of-go...

is good and that it gives the sources to its claims. I'm not aware that the later scholars refuted the relevant points for this topic:

"At least as early as the third century B.C. the name seems to have been regarded by the Jews as a "nomen ineffabile," on the basis of a somewhat extreme interpretation of Ex. xx. 7 and Lev. xxiv. 11 (see Philo, "De Vita Mosis," iii. 519, 529). Written only in consonants, the true pronunciation was forgotten by them. The Septuagint, and after it the New Testament, invariably render δκύριος ("the Lord")."

Note: the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew bible to Greek is effectively what was since the development of Christianity called by the Christians "the Old Testament" and the Christian bible textual analysis proves that the authors of the New Testament almost exclusively used only the Greek translation and also wrote the New Testament as Greek native speakers in Greek, having even misunderstandings from interpreting the Greek words differently than the original Hebrew, even if Hebrew could also be misinterpreted during reading, but not in the same way. Anyway, that's how other languages got the "Lord" and equivalents in their translations from what was originally written: from the Septuagint and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B... (note the difference from the 1906 Jewish quote).

Anyway, there is also the article about Jehovah, "mispronunciation (introduced by Christian theologians, but almost entirely disregarded by the Jews) of the Hebrew "Yhwh"":

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8568-jehovah

And this is where the faith of these involved in the discussion can influence their interpretation even more.

Still I believe this statement is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton#Yahweh

"Gesenius's proposal to read YHWH as יַהְוֶה is accepted as the best scholarly reconstructed vocalised Hebrew spelling of the Tetragrammaton" (i.e. transliterated into English as Yahweh)"

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#76

Post by ptah » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:26 AM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #74

ptah wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from your link: "In the Western world, Persia (or one of its cognates) was historically the common name for Iran" so I will stick to saying colonial as it accurately points to the western world as opposed to Africa or Asia for example

I don't disagree about the name that should be used, as I said. I just think calling it colonial needs a little more context for people who would not unreasonably assume it's something more similar to Western colonialism of India or something. On that note, "India"/Hindustan/Hindu/etc. are somewhat similarly colonial-rooted names, ironically popularized by the Iranians.

"western colonialism" is redundant. "colonialism" will suffice :)

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#77

Post by C1sc0cat » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:45 AM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #70

ptah wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean Iranian right? "Persian" is a colonial term

While you are correct in that it is an exonym, it's not exactly what I, and I assume many others today, would think of when you say "colonial." The origin of the word dates back to thousands of years ago when no present government or society existed. For those who would like to read a little more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Iran

Absolutely its normally used to refer to the Persian "empires" which you know colonised other lands and where a lot larger that Iran is today.

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#78

Post by ignoramous » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

dingoegret wrote: post #30

acqq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Greeks living in Egypt were actually Greeks, even during the existence of the Roman Empire. The Persian mathematicians living in Persia in the times after the Islamic conquest simply weren't Arabs, exactly like the Greeks weren't Romans after the Roman conquest . One doesn't get the new ethnicity by being occupied.

This is not true. They were likely ethnically Egyptian or Phoenician or Libyan but had Hellenic names. In the same way the Iranian mathematicians in the article had Arabic names. Culture and language often cross ethnic boundaries and it's up to historians to piece it all together.

> Iranian mathematicians

In the middle ages, there was greater Persia and two Iraqs (Iraq al-Arab to the west and Iraq al-Ajman to the east which is today's western and central Iran).

If we are being pedantic, either the polymaths in question were Persian (which they are) or Iraqi Arabs, not Iranians. In fact, Persian empire also encompassed parts of modern day Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan, until they came under the Turcko-Mongol rule.

Refs:

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

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

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#79

Post by Aenyn » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 10:11 AM UTC

dfhdshfff wrote: post #63

namirez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Brin lived in Russia, spoke Russian, and wrote books in Russian we wouldn't call him American just because he wrote a few books in English too. Perhaps you're not familiar with the history of that part of the world, but the individuals that I named were Persian speakers, who lived in a region that is called the Greater Iran today, and wrote most of their work in Persian. But in all fairness, Arabic was the lingua-…

> If Brin lived in Russia, spoke Russian, and wrote books in Russian we wouldn't call him American just because he wrote a few books in English too. But if he spoke Enlgish, had an English name, lived his professional life in America. and most of his major works were in Enlgish. I'd supposed you'd call him an "Anglophone" academic, which is the sense that Arab is used in.

>the individuals that I named were Persian speakers, who lived in a region that is called the Greater Iran today, and wrote most of their work in Persian

And yet they are called Arab mathematicians.

Re: Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)

#80

Post by wornohaulus » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 10:42 AM UTC

mda wrote: post #67

rohitupadhyay wrote: post #66

most of it was mathematics they learnt from translated books from Sanskrit , Prakrit ( In India ) and Mandarin(Chinese) . None of it was original Arab work , most of Arab historians who came along with invaders have mentioned in detail how learned people were taken in as slaves to translate works in arabic

What do you mean none of it is original, we are talking about a 400 years of process here, science always takes inspiration from all prior studies, do not discredit thousands of scientists that actually inspired western science. Also they were Muslim scientists different ethnicities, e.g Persian, Turkic and definitely Arabs as well.

He means none of the work is original.. neither the number system.. nor the additive and series based mathematics.. it's just a translation.. based10 numbers have been inuse in India for thousands of years.. it's like Columbus finding America..