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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?

#51

Post by Chathamization »

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.

It's not uncommon to see incorrect answers highly upvoted on AskHistorians - even ones from flaired users. That's one of the problems with the sub - though it's better than most Reddit subs, it's still far below the quality that most of its users and moderators believe it to be. Like with Wikipedia, you need to be skeptical of claims and actually look at the sources.

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

#52

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

HoveringOrb wrote: post #32
scarejunba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And so fairly representative of the real world.

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

#53

Post by jacobolus »

WalterBright wrote: post #45
jacobolus wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

You can do long division just fine on a counting board, though it is unclear if people had developed something like the modern elementary school division algorithm 2000+ years ago.

We don’t really know much about people’s calculation algorithms, because they were an oral tradition not written down, and only a very small number of counting boards (e.g. made of marble) survived; others were presumably made of leather, wood, cloth, lines scratched in the dirt, ....

Japanese soroban experts handily beat westerners at doing division, in both speed and accuracy. There is no reason to believe that calculation experts of the ancient world would not have been comparably competent.

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

#54

Post by fiblye »

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…

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.

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

#55

Post by Chathamization »

kennywinker wrote: post #20
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.

The dark ages simply refers to the loss of texts. There are few surviving texts from that period, so it is “dark”. Later the term was re-branded to mean “bad time when no new science was done” but that’s a viewpoint that doesn’t fit the facts. Source (a very enjoyable read at that!): https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-a...

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."

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

#56

Post by HarryHirsch »

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #19
HarryHirsch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are selling ads and moving money from one desk onto another instead of addressing antibiotic resistance and climate change.

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.

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

#57

Post by cbHXBY1D »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #48
dkersten wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will be remembered for our most important achievement: bringing high speed access to cat pictures to the masses.

Nope. Our most important achievement has been to create a system where smart people spend their life trying to get people to click on ads, using morally dubious dark-patterns.

If I had to bet, western society will be judged for creating an industrialized world while knowingly ignoring the effect of greenhouse gases.

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

#59

Post by m_mueller »

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…

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.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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.)

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