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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?

#31

Post by School-Cotton »

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.)

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 you can do without arithmetic and algebra.

(Edit: Saw your username after I posted this and I want to say that I respect you deeply -- I don't know of anyone else who has written a working C++ compiler almost by themselves. And I like D a lot, though have only had a very limited chance to use it professionally.)

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

#32

Post by HoveringOrb »

scarejunba wrote: post #5
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.

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.

But mostly, it's a graveyard of unanswered questions.

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

#33

Post by riazrizvi »

> "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 trouble. After doing this he thought he had himself seated on the throne of Jupiter, especially when Caesar said to him: 'Does anyone else know how to blow glass like this?' Just see what happened. He said not, and then Caesar had him beheaded. Why? Because if his invention were generally known we should treat gold like dirt. " (Satyricon 51)

This apocryphal story on economic incentives vs progressive incentives is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.

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

#34

Post by BalinKing »

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…

> 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.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

pochamago wrote: post #29
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

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by WalterBright »

saagarjha wrote: post #27
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.

Yes, I've seen OOP etc. done in C. As you say, it's awful, and so people don't do it. People devise their algorithms and data structures in ways that work smoothly with the language's features.

I'm sure you can compute sine and cosine tables using Roman numerals, too. But it would be so awfully ugly and tedious it's hardly a surprise that few would consider attempting it.

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

#38

Post by fortran77 »

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.

Probably the discovery of solid state devices and the invention of the digital computer is more important than the "Internet"

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

#39

Post by ZhuanXia »

riazrizvi wrote: post #33

> "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 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 charted by Malthus, an ocean which began to boil.

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

#40

Post by jacobolus »

WalterBright wrote: post #37
saagarjha wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, people don't do OOP or FP using C. Oh, but they do . It’s just that their syntax is awful.

Yes, I've seen OOP etc. done in C. As you say, it's awful, and so people don't do it. People devise their algorithms and data structures in ways that work smoothly with the language's features. I'm sure you can compute sine and cosine tables using Roman numerals, too. But it would be so awfully ugly and tedious it's hardly a surprise that few would consider attempting it.

> I'm sure you can compute sine and cosine tables using Roman numerals, too. But it would be so awfully ugly and tedious it's hardly a surprise that few would consider attempting it.

Ptolemy’s table of chords was calculated in base 60 (inherited from Mesopotamians), by probably a Roman citizen living in Egypt and writing in Greek.

It was probably done on some kind of a counting board analogous to the ones used for decimal calculations. Hellenistic mathematicians didn’t do written arithmetic either.

And yes, making such tables is inherently “awfully ugly and tedious”, unless you have an electronic calculator to do it for you.

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