Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by notinpersia » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:07 AM UTC

shademaan wrote: post #18

notinpersia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong on Algebra’s origin. Often people will say Persia but it was in Ancient Greece and Baghdad. And the latter is not Persia and was certainly not under Persian occupation during the time of Alkhawarizmi (who is also credited for the invention of the algorithm or at least it was named after him.) The original title of his book that coined the term Algebra is Al Jabr wal Muqabala (casting and equation) Just Google i…

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 ahead of national origin America can’t claim anything to its name. Period.

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

#22

Post by w8rbt » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:10 AM UTC

I was under the impression that the Romans were more applied/practical and less theoretical, but I may be wrong. I got that notion from a professor I had years ago who was fond of saying, "The Romans built roads. The Greeks talked about building roads." Has anyone else ever heard that saying?

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

#23

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:10 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #9

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, 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…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by Gatsky » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:11 AM UTC

markholmes wrote: post #14

Gatsky wrote: post #13

Makes you wonder what will be said for our era in 500 years time...

Does it? We visited the moon and created the internet in the span of one generation. We are arguably in the most innovative scientific period in our history.

Yes, I wasn’t trying to be disparaging.

Interesting though you cite mainly engineering achievements, I had a similar feeling that we are in a phase of engineering/materials advancements, particularly sub-microscale in the post-WW2 period. But having said that, technological advances of this kind tend to end up as historical footnotes, no matter how amazing they seem at the time.

I think vaccines and antibiotics are probably our era’s truly great technological advance that kids will still learn about post 26th century. But quantum mechanics and relativity are really our Pythagoras’ theorem equivalents, and will stay in textbooks for a very, very long time.

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

#25

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

notinpersia wrote: post #12

crooked-v wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wrong on Algebra’s origin. Often people will say Persia but it was in Ancient Greece and Baghdad. And the latter is not Persia and was certainly not under Persian occupation during the time of Alkhawarizmi (who is also credited for the invention of the algorithm or at least it was named after him.) The original title of his book that coined the term Algebra is Al Jabr wal Muqabala (casting and equation) Just Google i…

[deleted]

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

#26

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

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.)

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

#27

Post by saagarjha » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

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.)

> For instance, people don't do OOP or FP using C.

Oh, but they do. It’s just that their syntax is awful.

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

#28

Post by msla » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #4

oneepic wrote: post #3

O/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.

And they still get things drastically wrong sometimes:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190825021639/https://old.reddi...

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

#29

Post by pochamago » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

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.)

This is what I've heard. Planet Money has a good episode on how the invention of modern book keeping was significantly influenced by the adoption of Arabic numerals during the Renaissance

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

#30

Post by jacobolus » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

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.)

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 recording tool, not a calculating tool. Romans did calculations using pebbles or other counters on a counting board. Roman numerals are just a way of recording the state of a counting board before/after performing some algorithm. The goal of them is to be as direct and faithful a record of the counting board state as possible.