51–60 of 99 posts
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
Not only his systemized thinking, but his metaphysics—especially since it got later taken up by Christianity/Catholicism. I doubt we would have gotten to Naturalism (and modern science) without his influence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)
* https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography
Nevermind the day-to-day quality of life improvements of eye glasses. Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber
Would also need laters: modern communications would be much different if we still had to use copper cable (esp. over long distances), or microwave relays.
Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0
Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'. Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).
The interpretation of the concept that been different over time. See perhaps The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Kaplan:
I think that glass is under-appreciated. Without it we would not have telescopes and microscopes (and all the scientific (and later engineering) that came from them), and later movies and photography—the latter also led to photolithography. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography Nevermi…
Whoever figured out writing, all those years ago. The compounded effect of having knowledge recorded for generations to come - thereby unlocking all the other things mentioned on this list - surely should count for something.
What about reading.
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.
If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).
Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.
Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.
Genetic mapping and science.
The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.
Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.
Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.
"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, seriously. Descartes was quite a great mathematician, but he was wrong about pretty much anything related to philosophy, biology, or physics (I've read his explanation of the refraction law; it's frankly worse than Newton's).
Yes in terms of philosophy, Kant absolutely needs to be here, Newton and Leibniz not as notably so.
"I thought again about my early plan of a new language or writing-system of reason, which could serve as a communication tool for all different nations... If we had such an universal tool, we could discuss the problems of the metaphysical or the questions of ethics in the same way as the problems and questions of mathematics or geometry. That was my aim: Every misunderstanding should be nothing more than a miscalculation (...), easily corrected by the grammatical laws of that new language. Thus, in the case of a controversial discussion, two philosophers could sit down at a table and just calculating, like two mathematicians, they could say, 'Let us check it up ...’”