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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?

#171

Post by toasterlovin »

wavefunction wrote: post #144
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…

Were China and Japan really as peaceful as is sometimes stated? Just looking at a timeline of Chinese historical events (and probably by no means exhaustive) I see rebellions and invasions and peasant army uprisings for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history

Not peaceful, but stable and unified. Relatively. Consider that there has been something resembling a Chinese identity for several thousand years. Whereas Europe hasn’t been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire ~1600 years ago. And even then, the parts of Europe that played host to the scientific revolution were barely part of the Roman Empire. Or consider the fact that, relatively recently, the Japanese decided to cut off all contact with the outside world and forgo technological development. The idea of a European power trying to do similar is basically unthinkable due to the fact that they would have had half a dozen other nearby polities where no such restrictions were in place and change would have simply leaked in.

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

#172

Post by dredmorbius »

toasterlovin wrote: post #166
dredmorbius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for that most excellent answer! It gets at the industrial revolution (and the importance of coal deposits), but the scientific revolution preceded the industrial revolution by quite some time and was not dependent on coal. Something was happening around the English Channel and what is now Germany starting in around the 1600s. Why there and not somewhere else?

Again, views and theories vary greatly.

The Renaissance, printing, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the breaking of uniform Catholic control over thought and science. That's an area I've been exploring (I'm exploring a lot of areas, progress is slow), and it's fascinating.

The Bacons (Francis and Roger, no relation), free-thought movements especially in the north (Amsterdam and Copenhagen), and relative political freedom of inquiry in England all seem to have helped. It's interesting that the Enlightenment itself played heavily in Scotland, otherwise a hinterland (Adam Smith travelled to London for an education he didn't think much of, taking six weeks to make the journey by coach or on horseback, in the 1740s or 50s).

James Burke's television series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed cover much of this development (as well as earlier and later periods), and have been useful, though I'm starting to find holes in Burke's treatments (he wholly ignores Joseph Needham's work and Chinese invention, as examples).

Gregory Clark, mentioned above, has a generally excellent treatment of the question, one of the best I've read yet, though there's much I've yet to read.

Another excellent resource is the History of Information website. It's a useful place to explore questions such as this.

http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

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

#173

Post by empath75 »

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…

Why can’t you just include both. We talk about Italian Americans and African Americans or whatever all the time when we talk about accomplishment. He was a Persian who lived in an Arab empire.

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

#174

Post by kgwgk »

novacole wrote: post #84
steve19 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the Dark Age specifically refers to Western Europe, in much the same way the disastrous impact of the Mongol Empire on Islamic scholarship, for example the burning of libraries during or after the Siege of Baghdad, barely touched Western Europe. Chances are the Mongols destroyed some advanced mathematics that took centuries to rediscover.

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)

> renaissance wasn’t Western European

Was it Byzantine?

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

#175

Post by dredmorbius »

torben-friis wrote: post #169
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…

> Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign: You're pretty much equating English and Europe when talking about language, which in this case is very wrong. I, as a spaniard, can read poetry from a thousand years ago perfectly fine, and we do indeed do it in school.

In 1000 CE, the principle language of Spain was Arabic.

Though Spanish, Castillian, etc., were spoken. Well, back until 210 CE:

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

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

#176

Post by dredmorbius »

vidarh wrote: post #119
dredmorbius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And, researching just now: there are a few canals in Japan, though even a modern listing is short:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canals_in_Japan

Among the earliest is the Takase River canal, in Kyoto, 9.7 kilometers, dug in 1611. Most of the remainder date to the 19th or 20th centuries.

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

The Tatsumi Canal was constructed in 1623, 11 km.

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

Contrast the UK:

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

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

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

#177

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

For the curious, here's the watersheds of Europe map I had in mind:

http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

The borders especially of Spain, France, the former Austro-Hungarian (better described as the Danubian) Empire, and much of Germany and Poland are reasonably well evidenced.

The Balkans are as fractured hydrologically as they are politically.

Currently contiguous peninsular regions are defined in significant part by their coasts rather than rivers, probably showing the significance of sea-borne transport. Norway and Sweden are divided along their fall line, as are Spain and France by the Pyreneese Mountains. Switzerland is an identifiable mountain valley.

What's impressive about Russia is how unified it is by waterways. The Volga-Baltic Waterway provides contiguous maritime communication from the Black Sea to the Baltic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga–Baltic_Waterway

A comparable watersheds map of the US, showing the immensity of the Mississipi-Missouri-Ohio-Arkansas-Red river system:

https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

(Also the utter insanity of most current US state boundaries. At least if you're a fish.)

And the comparable watersheds map of China:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190825155610/https://s3.amazon...

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

#178

Post by marcosdumay »

toasterlovin wrote: post #50
ZhuanXia wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rise of technology was not so much the birth of new capacities, but the removal of old constraints. China, despite a much larger and more educated population, did not spark the industrial revolution. Their feedback loops were too stable, their elites too competent. From the perspective of the old power hierarchy, the industrial revolution was a disaster. The nobility floated on that great cruel ocean first charte…

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…

> do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas

Not the GP, but I think this one was very clearly caused by the English Revolution protecting people with weird ideas.

A large part of the early English intelligentsia was composed of people fleeing from persecution in Italy.

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

#179

Post by metastew »

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…

Pythagoras could be the reason why. He founded a school(?) and many famous philosophers and mathematicians of that time period were offshoots from that school, but that's based on a hazy recollection of my teenage interests in ancient Greek history.

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

#180

Post by mort96 »

theworld572 wrote: post #127
ominous wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way does the characterization of an European period dismiss historical periods elsewhere?

It doesn't, some people just like to get offended by things.

I find that assuming people who find something to be objectionable just do it because the "like to get offended by things" is a bit unproductive. At least hear them out and decide whether the explanation makes sense or not.
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