We still use their numbering system today, in prefaces and clocks!
And SuperBowls.
Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
61–70 of 201 posts
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#62Romans 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 discove…
That's like saying the Tang or Song eras didn't exist because they don't apply to Western Europe.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#63I bet it's a bitch to learn addition or multiplication using Roman numerals!
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#64Makes you wonder what will be said for our era in 500 years time...
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Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#65I suspect the roman numeral system played a bigger role in retarding roman mathematics than the reddit postings suggest. After all, it's fairly well known that the characteristics of a particular programming language have a strong influence on the way the language is used. (For instance, people don't do OOP or FP using C.)
I'm not convinced. The filesystem layer on Linux and FreeBSD (and probably other OSs too, though I don't have knowledge) is totally object-oriented and written in C. Gnome/GTK also encourage an object-oriented style in C, via GLib and GObject. Also, Greek numerals were just as unwieldy as Roman ones (if not worse), and at any rate the Greeks did not use numbers in their mathematics. There's an enormous amount of math…
O-O is a state of mind and can be implemented in nearly all algorithmic languages, you just need senior people who know WTF they are doing. And I've seen a lot of spaghetti non-o-o code in places like the Google web crawler even though there are class definitions there are no actual objects.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#66> "There was once a workman who made a glass cup that was unbreakable. So he was given an audience of the Emperor with his invention; he made Caesar give it back to him and then threw it on the floor. Caesar was as frightened as could be. But the man picked up his cup from the ground: it was dented like a bronze bowl; then he took a little hammer out of his pocket and made the cup quite sound again without any troubl…
The resistance to technological innovations is a very well-established human practice. I've shared Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1935) multiple times -- it's because I find it highly illuminating and well worth reading.
Original: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... (faint copy)
Re-typed / markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is (updated and corrected from April, 2019 version.)
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You lack serious historical context. We went fromom electricity to flight to nuclear to space flight to the internet in less than 150 years. Its been less than 100 years since antibiotics were invented, so, sorry we aren't addressing antibiotic resistance at a fast enough pace for you. Hope you don't mind all those vaccines that are keeping you healthy and providing here immunity: they've only been around for about 1…
The first powered aircraft flew in the 1900s, and by the 1940s we had jet aircraft. The Boeing 747 was introduced in the 1960s, and in the 1970s we had supersonic flight. The pace of innovation has stalled since.
"and in the 1970s we had supersonic flight"
1947?
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You lack serious historical context. We went fromom electricity to flight to nuclear to space flight to the internet in less than 150 years. Its been less than 100 years since antibiotics were invented, so, sorry we aren't addressing antibiotic resistance at a fast enough pace for you. Hope you don't mind all those vaccines that are keeping you healthy and providing here immunity: they've only been around for about 1…
The first powered aircraft flew in the 1900s, and by the 1940s we had jet aircraft. The Boeing 747 was introduced in the 1960s, and in the 1970s we had supersonic flight. The pace of innovation has stalled since.
We sculpt rocks to dimensions that are most easily measured in terms of layers of atoms for the price of mere dollars per rock.
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roman numerals are profoundly misunderstood by most people today, whose main knowledge about them is that various authority figures use them as an example of an awkward and cumbersome precursor to Hindu–Arabic numerals, backed up by a slight bit of personal experience learning to encode/decode Roman numerals, which is difficult because nobody today has any substantial amount of practice at it. Roman numerals are a re…
> Romans did calculations using pebbles or other counters on a counting board. I think you just made my point :-) Have fun doing long division that way.
Wouldn’t a slide-rule be a similar modern day approach?
Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Muslim Persian, and Baghdad was the melting pot of the world at that time. It’s like saying a German physicist in Princeton, NJ, which is to say that America not Germany was the place where the work was valued and promoted. Likewise, Alkhawarizmi was educated in Baghdad (not in Persia) and wrote his book on Algebra in Arabic. He was not educated in Persia and he did not write his book in Farsi. If we put ethnicity…
> If we put ethnicity ahead of national origin America can’t claim anything to its name. Period. It's silly to put ethnicity ahead of national origin, though, since one of America's biggest qualities it that it is a melting pot. This feels like saying "If we put learning curve ahead of type safety Haskell can't claim anything to its name. Period." It's true, but kinda vacuous.
But that particular super-famous German who lived in Princeton, NJ is also recognized as a German physicist. To say he was already quite accomplished when he left Europe would be an understatement.
Personally, I think if an immigrant of descendant of immigrants invents something prominent, it is fair for both countries to be proud of the accomplishment, and share that enthusiasm. It doesn't, or shouldn't hurt anyone. If anything, you are affirming accomplishment, not putting other people down.