Non-European Roots of Mathematics

     I found The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics to be a very interesting read. It deconstructs the Eurocentric notion that all modern day mathematics evolved from findings in Europe and Greece. I was aware of mathematical advances being made in countries outside of Europe, but there was a lot that I learned from the reading that I hadn't considered before.

    The first thing that stood out to me was that the Ancient Greeks took a lot of mathematical inspiration from Egypt. Kline (1953) argued that there was no development in mathematics before the Greeks and that there was no further developments after the Greeks for thousands of years until Europeans started to make mathematical advancements. However, this is directly opposed by Joseph (1991) who says that many famous Greek mathematicians such as Aristotle, Thales, and Pythagoras travelled to Egypt and Mesopotamia to learn mathematics from these areas. There is evidence that the Ancient Babylonians had understood the relation between sides of right-angled triangles before Pythagoras wrote his theorem. I think Kline's way of thinking is very Eurocentric and it surprises me that he thought there was no advancements in math for thousands of years outside of Europe. Unfortunately, this belief is still propagated even now. In school, the names of great mathematicians we learn about are those of Euclid, Archimedes, and Pythagoras. All of them are either Greek or European, and we learn little about mathematical advancements elsewhere in history and less about the mathematicians themselves.

    Unfortunately, due to this Eurocentric way of learning the history of mathematics in school, when I think of the Dark Ages, I think of Europe and the Black Plague. The article was enlightening when it showed that there was so much happening in the rest of the world while the Dark Ages happened in Europe. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the visual that during this time, the world grinded to a halt, advancements everywhere was halted, and it was this time of primal survival in civilization. However, it makes sense that developments in mathematics was spontaneously happening elsewhere in the world. To name a few that were in The Crest of the Peacock, there was the beginnings of the discovery of algebra by the Arabs, the adoption of the Indian numerical system, and the creation of a large library filled with texts from various sources that were studied and built upon. 

    Finally, I was really shocked that the Arabic numerical system originated from India. I don't know why this caught me so off guard, but reading into it a bit more, it was adopted by the Arabs many centuries after it was invented in India. I've learned my whole life that the system has Arabic origins and I never really looked into it after that. It's interesting that the Europeans adopted the system from studying Arabic sciences, so that's probably why I never knew that the system had roots in India. It once again shows the Eurocentric way of looking at mathematics, because the Europeans thought the system was Arabic and it's what I ended up being taught in school.

Comments

  1. Amanda FritzlanSeptember 21, 2022 at 12:06 PM

    Siyu, Thank you for this thoughtful post! It can be wonderful to burst open assumptions and mythologies about the histories of mathematics (and other subject areas) such as the Dark Ages. The Islamic Golden Age is an incredibly rich period of mathematical activity that is typically neglected in mathematics education.

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