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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?

#111

Post by novaRom »

olooney wrote: post #2

Romans 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 ... which likewise produced little (not none) new math.

Wrong! If you mean times between 500 and 1200: how about arabs, iranians, indians, chinese? Algebra, Negative numbers, 0123456789 system of writing?

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#112

Post by Keysh »

breck wrote: post #78
Chathamization wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there definitely seems to have been a large decline in population, economic output, political cohesion, urbanization, record keeping, trade, etc., in much of the former Roman world following the fifth/sixth century. I suppose it's a value judgement on whether one considers that a "bad time."

Curious if you have any sources? I've never seen a data driven case that such a thing as the "dark ages" ever happened.

There's an excellent book on the subject called The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins. It includes a detailed overview of the archeological evidence, which shows a very clear and dramatic decline in the economy and living standards -- and some areas of technology -- between circa 350 and 600 in the Western Empire. (And the recovery afterwards took centuries.) The Eastern Empire, interestingly, doesn't show any signs of a similar decline until the 7th Century.

For example, peasant households in Italy at the height of the empire had a wide variety of well-made pottery, some of it originating from production centers hundreds of miles away, along with tiled roofs; after the collapse, the variety and quality of pottery was greatly reduced, and tiled roofs disappear. (Tiled roofs provide better protection against rain, are less flammable, and require less maintenance and rebuilding than wooden shingles or thatch; but they also require large kilns, lots of clay and fuel, and a good transportation network.)

And ice cores from Greenland show extensive metalworking going on in Western Europe (in the form of copper and lead pollution carried through the air) during the Roman Empire; after the collapse of the Western Empire, the pollution levels don't return to Roman-era values until the 16th Century.

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#113

Post by Keysh »

m_mueller wrote: post #59
toasterlovin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumu…

Your reasoning is actually an argument for why Japan developed like Europe, and that's indeed largely what happened. Have a read on sengoku- and meiji period. Japan's trajectory was very different from China's. What you probably mean is the 250ish year stable edo period under the Tokugawa warlord control when the emperor was stripped of power.

The Emperors were stripped of power back in the 12th Century, after the Genpei War and the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate. They remained stripped of power for almost the next seven hundred years; the power struggles were about who would get to be Shogun.

(The logic of the Meiji "Restoration" was essentially "Let's get rid of the archaic Shogunate system that has dominated Japan in one way or another for the last seven hundred years, and pretend we're handing power back to the Emperor where it really belongs.")

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#114

Post by mdemare »

dredmorbius wrote: post #89
fiblye wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did geography have an effect here? I don't see what you mean. And China hasn't really had too much stability. It's always been full of revolutions, competing empires, dynastic changes, warring states, shifts in power, changes in ethnic ruling class, and so on. Go through a list of deadliest wars and revolutions and a good chunk of them are in what is today China.

China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years. It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually. Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication o…

That text is over 1000 years old.

This is Shakespeare, from 1599:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Hardly foreign

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#115

Post by bigfudge »

sk5t wrote: post #98
dredmorbius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years. It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually. Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication o…

> English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign Are you suggesting this text is from the 17th century? I'm no expert but this much Germanic influence seems much older.

It’s Anglo Saxon, which much older. With a bit of effort a modern speaker can read Chaucer which is about 1300

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#116

Post by Keysh »

WalterBright wrote: post #26

I 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.)

As someone else pointed out, this does nothing to explain why Roman-era mathematics seems to have stagnated, compared to the Classical and Hellenistic Greek mathematics that preceded it. Greek mathematicians didn't have access to Indian/Arabic numbers either. (And it mistakes "using numbers" for "mathematics" -- much of Greek mathematics was focused on geometry.)

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#118

Post by Keysh »

notinpersia wrote: post #21
shademaan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the first result of that search for me says it was created in Baghdad, but by a Persian mathematician

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…

No, Baghdad was located in the heart of the former Persian (Sassanian) Empire, a mere 35 km from the site of the Sassanian capital (Ctesiphon). Although the whole area gradually became Arabized, at the time it was still significantly Persian.

(Frankly, I doubt we know where Al-Khwarizmi was educated. We know he was originally from what's now Uzbekistan, and that he ended up in Baghdad, but not much more than that.)

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#119

Post by vidarh »

dredmorbius wrote: post #73
toasterlovin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumu…

The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the Needham Question , after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China , an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 and still in proces…

To add to your points on both flat terrain and waterways in England: in fact the current railway that runs a few blocks from my house runs along what used to be a canal dug from the Thames to enable transport. It was one of the last ones to open before the railway took over (and the operator went bankrupt and sold the land to a railway company that drained it and used the conveniently flattened land for more rails)

A local lake used to be an artificial reservoir to keep the canal filled.

The UK is full of canals that were viable to dig because of that flat terrain.

So large parts of England that were not reachable by river are still reachable by canal boat, and even more used to be before many of the canals were filled in or drained when no longer commercially viable for transport.

Re: Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?

#120

Post by gingabriska »

fsloth wrote: post #97
novacole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Rome isn’t Western Europe. So western Europe’s entire history is a “dark age” before the Age of Enlightenment. (Edit: incorrectly said renaissance instead of Age of Enlightenment... the renaissance wasn’t Western European either)

I don't know what you mean, but: 1. Roman empire dominion included, but did not limit to what we now refer to as Western Europe... 2... of whose languages are either mostly descended from, or heavily influenced by Latin... 3. ... And where the dominant religion is still the Roman state religion. Which was lorded over by the Roman state church for a thousand years before an angry German monk suggested that this was re…

Romans culturally ate less meat and frowned upon their Northern Germanic Tribes who almost always ate meat. They were more frugal in their way of life.

The Germanic Tribes were also taller and were acknowledged by Romans as formidable warrior.

Culturally tho, Romans were South Europeans and assimilated what we call South Italy and Greece now.

They also captured parts of middle east but culturally they never became Romans.

>3. ... And where the dominant religion is still the Roman state religion. Which was lorded over by the Roman state church for a thousand years before an angry German monk suggested that this was really weird and could we keep the book and get rid of the pope.

There were other Pagan religions at the time and in middle east Jews didn't accept Roman state religion.

But then again, people born in Roman Empire got Roman citizenship on Birth so it didn't matter what you were culturally or religiously or tribe/ethnicity.

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