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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

It’s a shorthand; “Arabic” or “Islamic” mathematicians were from a wide range of religions, ethnic groups, regions, etc.

It’s similar to the way we call all of the mathematicians of ~ 500 BCE – 500 CE “Greek”, even though most of the later ones were Roman citizens living in Egypt or elsewhere.

Or the way we call Mesopotamian mathematics generically “Babylonian”, even though most of it was from other cities, and some of the relevant developments lumped in are from before Babylon per se existed, done by people of a different ethnic group who spoke a different language.

Or the way Soviet scientists are often called “Russian”.

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The Greeks living in Egypt were actually Greeks, even during the existence of the Roman Empire.

The Persian mathematicians living in Persia in the times after the Islamic conquest simply weren't Arabs, exactly like the Greeks weren't Romans after the Roman conquest.

One doesn't get the new ethnicity by being occupied.

Some of them were ethnically Hellene. But folks of any ethnicity throughout the Roman empire (or earlier the Alexandrian empire etc.) of the time who wanted to do mathematical work would have probably traveled to Alexandria or Athens to study and would have written mathematical results in Greek, which was the language of science/mathematics/philosophy of the day.

We unfortunately don’t have too many biographical details about most of the famous “Greek” mathematicians, so it’s generally not precisely known what their background was.

This is not true. They were likely ethnically Egyptian or Phoenician or Libyan but had Hellenic names. In the same way the Iranian mathematicians in the article had Arabic names. Culture and language often cross ethnic boundaries and it's up to historians to piece it all together.

> Iranian mathematicians

In the middle ages, there was greater Persia and two Iraqs (Iraq al-Arab to the west and Iraq al-Ajman to the east which is today's western and central Iran).

If we are being pedantic, either the polymaths in question were Persian (which they are) or Iraqi Arabs, not Iranians. In fact, Persian empire also encompassed parts of modern day Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan, until they came under the Turcko-Mongol rule.

Refs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanid_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Intermezzo

dingoegret: your sibling comment here is dead.

Anyway, “Persia” (Persis) comes from the Greek version of “Pars”. Persians call their language “Farsi”, from the Arabic version, “Fars”. These all have the same origin, and date back millennia.

I think the point was that the mathematics being described is bound by geography rather than by ethnicity. Arabia is used both to refer to an ethnicity and a geographic area. So the usage is sound, as is namirez' subtle clarification due to the history of the area.

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