Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
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Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
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Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#2Romans aren't the outlier here. Most ancient civilizations had a similar level of accomplishment; a one or two outstanding mathematicians every century, a few practical applications, some new rules of thumb. We did have a dark age, after the Romans after all, which likewise produced little (not none) new math.
The question should rather be, what made the Greeks (and, later, others who adopted their deductive, axiomatic method) so exceptionally productive at mathematics?
Or to paraphrase Wigner, why is Hellenistic mathematics so unreasonably effective?
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#3O/T: One real answer, and multiple bot posts, including one about removing another real person's comment. As a person who doesn't read much Reddit, it leaves a really strange impression.
Anyway, the top answer was still a cool read.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#4O/T: One real answer, and multiple bot posts, including one about removing another real person's comment. As a person who doesn't read much Reddit, it leaves a really strange impression. Anyway, the top answer was still a cool read.
This is typical of /r/AskHistorians , not Reddit as a whole.
They have an explicit policy of removing any amateurish or unsourced answers, in order to keep quality high.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#5O/T: One real answer, and multiple bot posts, including one about removing another real person's comment. As a person who doesn't read much Reddit, it leaves a really strange impression. Anyway, the top answer was still a cool read.
It's a "serious" subreddit. Unlike HN (or many other subreddits), where you can say something completely incorrect and be upvoted by the army of uninformed people, /r/askhistorians specifically allows only well-sourced posts.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#6O/T: One real answer, and multiple bot posts, including one about removing another real person's comment. As a person who doesn't read much Reddit, it leaves a really strange impression. Anyway, the top answer was still a cool read.
This is typical of /r/AskHistorians , not Reddit as a whole. They have an explicit policy of removing any amateurish or unsourced answers, in order to keep quality high.
Doesn't that imply that the rest of reddit which is less heavily moderated has more low quality comments?
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is typical of /r/AskHistorians , not Reddit as a whole. They have an explicit policy of removing any amateurish or unsourced answers, in order to keep quality high.
Doesn't that imply that the rest of reddit which is less heavily moderated has more low quality comments?
Yes, and IMO it really does.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#8I'm not an expert here, but wasn't the development of "zero" a rather monumental leap that was required before you could advance past Greek math? The spread into the Islamic world certainly enabled them to finally push past the Greeks.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#9Romans aren't the outlier here. Most ancient civilizations had a similar level of accomplishment; a one or two outstanding mathematicians every century, a few practical applications, some new rules of thumb. We did have a dark age, after the Romans after all, which likewise produced little (not none) new math. The question should rather be, what made the Greeks (and, later, others who adopted their deductive, axiomat…
> We did have a dark age, after the Romans after all, which likewise produced little (not none) new math.
Use of the term "dark age" is both dramatically inaccurate in many ways [1] and totally elides everything that happened outside of Europe, such as the establishment of algebra as an independent field of mathematical study (AD 800 in Baghdad), the creation of algebraic geometry (AD 1070 in Persia), and the discovery of ways to solve high-order polynomial equations (approximately AD 1200 in India and China).
[1]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/medieval-history-wh...
Edit: Fixed a location.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#10They probably innovated in math, in some form of risk modeling or something, but no single fancy intellectual wrote it all down:
https://priceonomics.com/how-maritime-insurance-built-ancien...