Modern mathematics emerged from “The House of Wisdom” in the 13th century | Hacker News Reader

Modern mathematics emerged from “The House of Wisdom” in the 13th century

bbc.com

148 pointsmellosouls115 comments

“Scholars and translators at the library also took great pains to ensure that their work was accessible to the reading public. ”

This point cannot be stressed enough.

What percentage of the population was the reading public back then though?

> The centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition helped to make education a central pillar of the religion in virtually all times and places in the history of Islam.[50] The importance of learning in the Islamic tradition is reflected in a number of hadiths attributed to Muhammad, including one that instructs the faithful to "seek knowledge, even in China".[50] This injunction was seen to apply particularly to scholars, but also to some extent to the wider Muslim public, as exemplified by the dictum of al-Zarnuji, "learning is prescribed for us all".[50] While it is impossible to calculate literacy rates in pre-modern Islamic societies, it is almost certain that they were relatively high, at least in comparison to their European counterparts.[50]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age#Education

Very interesting, thanks!

I don't think this is enough to conclude that "it is almost certain that they were relatively high." I don't have numbers unfortunately but anecdotally I don't think Arabic literacy rates in non-Arabic Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan or Malaysia are very high, even though it's accorded a special place in the constitution of Pakistan.

This is pertaining in particular to the Islamic world of the 8th to 14th centuries, which has been called the 'Golden Age' of Islam. I think, relatively speaking by contemporary standards, you'd be hard pressed to say modern Pakistan is in a golden age. But this is well outside any of my areas of expertise, so I could be wrong.

One of my biggest takeaway from the 20th century study of history has been a wariness of using the words "Golden Age" or "Dark Age" alone to draw conclusions about what life was like for people outside of the elite.

As such I'm don't think the presence of a Golden Age is itself a particularly strong argument for literacy among the general populace.

Back then, an education was limited to basic math and arithmetic for business, a knowledge of Arabic literature and a study of the Quran, so it's very likely that people were very educated in the cities back then. Once the Abbasid Empire fell (the Islamic Golden Age period), none of the successor civilizations pursued such studies further - and none of them were Arabian empires, so that left the Arab world to stagnate.

Malaysia had a strong Chinese influence coupled with an Islamic tradition, so they most certainly spoke a lot of Arabic before Dutch rule. Even during Dutch rule, Arabic was used to announce royal decrees, until Malay took over with a sense of national identity.

As for Pakistan, the Western provinces are largely influenced by Afghan-Iranian culture (Pashto and Baluchi), while places like Sindh and Punjab had large Hindu populations before independence. So the study of Arabic wasn't as actively encouraged except for religious purposes. On the contrary, many Pakistanis today still stick to regional dialects and languages such as Pashto, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi, even though the official language is Urdu. Such non uniformity makes things way harder.

What makes me mad is my mom learned about Ibn Shatir in Damascus at school in Karachi but not one word about al Biruni measuring circumference of Earth at Nandana in Punjab or say Bakhshali manuscript.

> Once the Abbasid Empire fell (the Islamic Golden Age period), none of the successor civilizations pursued such studies further - and none of them were Arabian empires, so that left the Arab world to stagnate.

This might give the misleading impression that Arabs were a large part of the intellectual ferment of the Islamic Golden Age. They got it started by forming an enormous new empire but it was the work of their subjects, not themselves. Same with the Mongols.

> It is notable that most of the intellectuals who were patronized and shone under the Abbassids in the decades after 800 A.D. were not Muslim Arabs. There were even some oddball characters, such as Tabit ibn Qurra, a pagan Syrian from Haran. One reason al-Kindi was the “Philosopher of the Arabs” is that he was a tribal Arab. But more typical were Iranians such as Avicenna and al-Razi. If you accept S. Frederick Starr’s argument in Lost Enlightenment and Christopher Beckwith’s in Warriors of the Cloisters Iranians disproportionately from Turan, modern Central Asia, were particularly influential in shaping the high culture and intellectual tone of the world of Islam after 800 A.D.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/07/05/how-the-arabs-crea...

Wholly agree. A lot of work was done by Persians and North Africans. But the difference between the Abbasid and the Ottoman/Mughal/Safavids was that the Abbasid Empire encouraged such studies, since they were a relatively liberal kind. Except in theological matters.

> Back then, an education was limited to basic math and arithmetic for business, a knowledge of Arabic literature and a study of the Quran, so it's very likely that people were very educated in the cities back then.

My point is that this is still legally mandated as the standard in e.g. Pakistan and Arabic literacy rates (even in cities I think) still aren't very high. Just reading the Pakistani constitution I would've assumed high Arabic literacy rates which isn't the case. I think government decrees are weak evidence in favor of higher literacy rates, but I don't think it's enough to conclude "with near certainty" that literacy rates among the general populace would've been significantly higher as a result.

> Even during Dutch rule, Arabic was used to announce royal decrees, until Malay took over with a sense of national identity.

An analogous situation held in Medieval Japan and Korea with respect to Classical Chinese and IIRC scholars don't think the general population was very literate in Classical Chinese as a result.

Pakistan wasn't part of the Arab World proper, even in those times. My comment specifically pertained to Arabic in the Arab World in those times. Pakistan wasn't even Muslim at the time, save for Western Sindh, and rule was largely relegated to Brahmin administrators.

The literacy and respect for learning was very high in early centuries of Islam. For some first hand relation, I recommend reading Ibn Sina’s autobiography, who described lively market for books in even minor towns, huge libraries maintained by kings, the reception and great respect he received from them etc. For comparison, literacy and development in 11th century Europe was really rather low, as it only started to recover from the civilizational collapse after the fall of the western Roman Empire.

However, respect for learning in Islamic world started to deteriorate around the time of the fall of the caliphate, while it kept increasing in Europe, and by the time of reformation in 16th century, Europe was significantly ahead: spread of reformation was both dependent on widespread literacy, and it also was responsible for its spread.

> who described lively market for books in even minor towns

Yep, this is stronger evidence. I'm more sold.

Respect for learning itself though IMO is fairly weak (though nonzero) evidence. Historians have wildly differing estimates (admittedly with gigantic error bars given the difficulty of studying literacy rates) for the literacy rates of different time periods of Imperial China despite a near-constant "respect for learning."

Also:

Bhaskaracharya and the man who found zero:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/06/bhaskaracharya-and-man-w...

The roots of "House of Wisdom" were really laid during the time of the Alid (as the Shi'a Islam's founder Ali al-Murtada's progeny were known), Zayn al-Abedin (who was also Muhammad's grandson's son).

Zayn al-Abedin's son, al-Bakir, and al-Bakir's son, Jafar al-Sadiq taught at a university (in Medina and elsewhere) believed to be 25000 students strong at its peak.

Indeed a majority of Islamic theological offshoots, including the largest one in Hanafi Islam, take root in this university.

Jabir (latin: Geber) is perhaps amongst al-Sadiq's famous students. He invented modern Chemistry. al-Sadiq's students believed to have written cryptic books on al-Kimia (Alchemy), and in a way, writing such esoteric books in a cryptic manner gave rise to cryptography as a medium of securing text and thought.

The Ummayids, who ruled from al-Shaam (Syria), disliked these Alids and their universities and everything they stood for (especially in terms of religious authority) and heavily persecuted them. The Abbasids, who pretty much came to power after a bloody rebellion in support of the Alids turned out to be worser in their treatment of Alids than the Ummayids.

In the face of Abbasid cruelty, the Alids retreated to al-Misr (Egypt) and ruled from there for around 300 years over the Magbreb (Northern Africa), parts of Italy, the Levant, Hejaz (Western Saudi Arabia), and Yemen whilst the Abbasids ruled the rest of the Middle-Eastern Islamic world from Iraq.

al-Rashid's House of Wisdom (Dar al-Hikma) was allegedly setup as a counter to the one run by the Alids of Egypt (who were now known as the Fatimids). It was alleged the Fatimids amassed a lot of wealth due to their knowledge of Alchemy.

A rebellious offshoot of the Fatimids under Hasan al-Sabah, a student of the Fatimid House of Wisdom (Dar al-Ilm), would later fight in the Crusades and come to be notoriously known as the Hash-Hashins (or the Assassins).

With the rise of the Turks and the Mongols sealing the decline of Abbasids of Iraq, Safavids of Iran, and Fatimids of Egypt; the Islamic Golden Age would rather come to a swift end.

A physical embodiment of Baghdad's Dar al-Hikma hasn't survived but that of Cairo's Dar al-Ilm lives on in al-Azhar, which is considered to be one of the most (if not the most) important Islamic universities even today.

Hanafi Islam is not a theological offshoot. It’s one of Islam’s 4 major schools of law, the other three are Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali. All of them are inside what is considered orthodox mainstream Islam.

> A rebellious offshoot of the Fatimids under Hasan al-Sabah, a student of the Fatimid House of Wisdom (Dar al-Ilm), would later fight in the Crusades and come to be notoriously known as the Hash-Hashins (or the Assassins).

Lots of misinformation you have there in one paragraph. Read up a better researched history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan-i_Sabbah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Assassins#Overview

You want me to do your work for you by recommending later research from academia, which invalidates Sacy and Marco Polo's fiction and ignorance? Do your own work and look up Institute of Ismaili Studies and their research from the recent times.

Consider updating Wikipedia, for all of us :)

Make sure it isn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories

> It is a tale that should dismantle our Eurocentric view of mathematics, shine a spotlight on the Islamic world’s scientific achievements

Well, the word 'algebra' would suggest credit is being given to the Arab world.

Let's not also forget that the Chinese had been reading and writing for centuries before anyone else.

The people who invented algebra and, indeed, science, were absolutely not Arabic. They were Persians and Egyptians working as Islamic scholars in an explicitly Islamic tradition. That Islamic scholarship has fallen so far since their time is a great tragedy.

Are you not contradicting your previous post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25318387

Don't see how. They wrote in Arabic, but were not themselves Arabs. Arabic, the language, was carried with Islam out of Arabia to the entire Indian Ocean seacoast, and well inland most places.

This is what I gather as well from a bit of reading. It seems that most innovation in mathematics of the time came from Persian, but obviously this then became part of Islamic empire, and it seems under those for a time they were still friendly to people continuing to learn about and advance those pre-islamic sciences. The Madrasas might have helped fund for further people to learn about and push those sciences, so the institutions put in place during some of the Islamic empires also do seem to have helped invest in them.

> Muslims distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients" or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences.[50] Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam.[50] In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student.

This has to be commended at least, I'm not sure all strongly religious empires supported teaching people non-religious sciences/philosophies and invested in their further study.

>Let's not also forget that the Chinese had been reading and writing for centuries before anyone else.

Written Chinese isn't even as old as written Greek, much less the oldest written languages...

I suspect that in this case, a more reasonable interpretation of Chinese would be 'the people living in the area that is now China' rather than 'speakers of modern day Mandarin'.

To put some hard numbers:

The modern Greek alphabet (in shape) essentially dates back to ~5th century BC, with the alphabet itself largely originating about 9th century BC, although some letters were added, removed, or changed in the meantime.

Classical Latin fully developed its alphabet about 1st century BC--we use this alphabet still today, although letters J and V were not added until the Renaissance. Its origins are perhaps about 7th century BC (with most of the letterforms being stable from its inception, although the inventory definitely changed a few times in the meantime).

Modern Chinese script dates from around 2nd century AD, although the distinction between Simplified (1950s) and Traditional Chinese is greater than the distinction I've made between modern and original scripts for Greek and Latin.

The history of modern Chinese script is a bit harder to trace than Western alphabets. Oracle bone script is dated to about 13th century BC, and the earliest scripts that are generally recognizable date to about 3rd century BC, and the intervening history is well outside my area of knowledge. By contrast, we know that Latin derives from Ancient Greek script, which itself derives from Phoenician, which is dated to ~11th century BC. Phoenician itself derives from Egyptian, itself dated to perhaps the 4th millennium BC, well before the Chinese region developed writing.

Comparing to other regions, Mesoamerica appears to develop writing somewhere in the early 1st millennium BC, although the relationship between various Preclassic civilizations is very much in dispute. Andean civilizations develop quipu at least as early as the Wari civilization (late 1st millennium AD), although there is an artifact from Norte Chico (3rd millennium BC) that is arguably a quipu. Whether or not quipu is some kind of writing system is of course hotly debated. Indus Valley script develops in the 3rd millennium BC, but here again it's debated if this is actually a fully developed script. And of course, Sumerian cuneiform develops in the late 4th millennium BC, the oldest known true writing system.

So, in short, Chinese script postdates Greek and Latin scripts by almost any metric you choose.

>Well, the word 'algebra' would suggest credit is being given to the Arab world.

Also 'algorithm', 'alchemy' and 'alcohol', IIRC, and maybe other words too.

For those more interested in Islamic history around this time period, I would recommend http://abbasidhistorypodcast.com. For more about the history of science and philosophy, I recommend the “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”.

Completely ignoring the fact that this Islamic mathematics reached the Islamic world from Hindu India.

Also, I always find it interesting how every such article insists on attributing such achievements to the religion rather than the region, even if they have to refer to modern country names, or even use terms such as Persian and Arabic.

Much of what Islamic scholars preserved was also from Greece and Rome I believe. From what I understand, many Greek and Roman texts only exist today because they were transcribed and preserved by Islamic scholars.

Greek and Roman works were, indeed, transcribed to Arabic. But the Romans got their maths from the Greeks, who got much of theirs from the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

Zero, with "Arabic" numbering, certainly originated in Northern India. Was it "Hindu"? The people credited with inventing it certainly were. But they may have learned much from the Harappans, whose work is today wholly unknown.

Persians and Egyptians, many of them Muslim, created a great deal of new mathematics, building upon older works. They also invented, in all its details, what we now call science. It was introduced to Europe on the back of a book, Optics, by Al-Haytham. The earliest European scientists freely admitted their debt to him.

Appreciation for higher learning in the medieval Islamic world was no more universal than in Renaissance Europe, or in our modern world, but it was honored in pockets, for just barely enough centuries to catch on in similarly restricted pockets of Europe.

Is modern science Christian? Not if you believe many Christians. But many of the people who built science atop translations from Arabic were very seriously Christian.

Higher learning is always anomalous wherever it blossoms, and always treated with suspicion by many in both church and government everywhere. It doesn't belong to any culture or people. We can honor anyone, anywhere, who fostered it, whatever their ancestors' or descendents' failings.

Problems also arise from the fact that Hindus were a group of people not religion. Hindus now are people who identity religious with Hinduism

The word Hindu is derived (through Persian) from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, the historic local appellation for the Indus River in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, which is first mentioned in the Rig Veda. - google

I believe that Sicily, during the 1100s, was the place where translations from both Arabic and Greek to Latin occurred. In that century, it was ruled by the Normans who had conquered the Arabs. (Yes, the Normans, that same ex-Viking, Normandy-based group who were also busy conquering England, at that time!) There were separate law courts for each of the three language groups and translators who could speak all three languages.

I couldn't find a definitive reference. There is this short scholarly article from 1920, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1834924?seq=13#metadata_info_ta.... And this series of articles about Sicily's history, http://www.bestofsicily.com/history.htm

One key figure seems to have been Adelard of Bath. "He is known both for his original works and for translating many important Arabic and Greek scientific works of astrology, astronomy, philosophy and mathematics into Latin from Arabic versions, which were then introduced to Western Europe." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelard_of_Bath

I mean, sure. But there seems to be this weird underlying idea that the world owes Islam a debt of gratitude for conquering the region where these texts existed and had been successfully transcribed and preserved under Christian rule for hundreds of years already, as if they swooped in at just the right moment to save them from being swallowed by the desert.

It rarely makes sense to debate what-ifs in history. Because we don't know the alternate. We owe all past scholars a debt of gratitude for being the keepers and makers of knowledge as it passed through time. That includes the Greece, Rome, India. That includes the Islamic caliphate, especially during the Islamic Golden Age.

Both are missing the point. The important point is this was before Islam.

Propaganda works in so many ways, I find it curious too. Especially when you look at the source material, the author and what agenda they're trying to push.

I am aware, but ignorant of the "rules" that the BBC follows. Some internal script to moderate, guideline and direct what they publish, how they publish, etc.

Then again the same can be said of any government backed, funded news agency. But I do agree alot of Islamic math is given, even to defaults such as "arabic numbers."

But this is above what I know. :) It's something I'd like to narrow down, learn and discover, but it's just quite a bit of info to take.

Arabic numbers are actually Hindu numbers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral...

The "rules" are mostly unspoke conventions but the BBC tries to do its bit to damp down racial hatred and the like and give Islam seems to get in the headlines mostly for Islamic State type stuff I think they feel a need to counterbalance that a bit.

Why do you think they treat religions as being as important as race but not other beliefs like political, conspiracy theories, or certain other religions? BBC certainly isn't doing much to damp down political hatred so what's their true aim? I'd guess it's just to reinforce whatever arbitrary ideals of "good" and "bad" their culture has converged on and actually stoke hatred towards their perceived enemies because their culture encourages that.

Modern Islam is pretty strongly anti-science and has been for half its existence - since the end of the golden age. So it's probably not enlightening to think of those ancient people as being part of the same group as modern Muslims. It's almost a different religion. Then, it was open to free thinking and tolerant of outsiders and non-Muslims. Now, it's socially conservative, rigid in what thoughts are allowed, isolationist and intolerant of anyone critical of the religion.

I think you are overthinking it a bit. They try to be mainstream and moderate.

Mathematics in the Arab/Islamic was mainly built from Ancient Greece. Although there definitely seems to be an Indian influence.

How so? The article calls it the Hindu-Arabic system.

Yes - I agree that some scholarship tends to bunch all of the middle east under one umbrella. There were Persian scholars and Arab scholars - and that too is quite a broad term. However, there is some merit in there as well as at that time those regions were under Islamic caliphates of one kind or another (Abbasid/Umayyad etc).

The article does not ignore that fact ...

> In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.

Because it came from the region ruled by the Islamic state at the time. We're talking about the 13th century.

Persian and Arabic are not accurate depictions of what is mean. The correct word is indeed Islamic, as in Islamic civilization and Islamic system. It was very much something at the time, beyond just religion.

When trying to be more specific, they do use words such as Persian.

Also, a lot of the mathematics was indeed indigenous to the Islamic world.

Not all Perso-Arabic mathematics is Indian in origin

Excellent point. And was Hindu or Islamic mathematics not modern? Did it only "emerge" as modern mathematics when it arrived in europe?

I wish the article defined what their definition of "modern mathematics" is. It's primary focus is on the transfer of the Hindu-Arabic to Europe. What is it about the transfer of the numeral system to europe that made it "modern".

Also, wasn't "modern mathematics" officially formalized fairly recently? The early 20th century?

They're probably referring to modernity in the historian's sense of post-Renaissance.

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

It's true that zero -- and the place-value system -- came from India, but it's not true that all of the mathematics of the Abbasid Caliphate was simply borrowed Hindu math. Al-Khwarizmi, whose book introduced Hindu qua "Arabic" numerals to the West, generally built on Greek and Indian contributions and therefrom invented al-jabr, a distinctly Arabic word now pronounced "algebra".

>It is true that in two respects the work of al-Khowarizmi represented a retrogression from that of Diophantus. First, it is on a far more elementary level than that found in the Diophantine problems and, second, the algebra of al-Khowarizmi is thoroughly rhetorical, with none of the syncopation found in the Greek Arithmetica or in Brahmagupta's work. Even numbers were written out in words rather than symbols! It is quite unlikely that al-Khwarizmi knew of the work of Diophantus, but he must have been familiar with at least the astronomical and computational portions of Brahmagupta; yet neither al-Khwarizmi nor other Arabic scholars made use of syncopation or of negative numbers. Nevertheless, the Al-jabr comes closer to the elementary algebra of today than the works of either Diophantus or Brahmagupta, because the book is not concerned with difficult problems in indeterminant analysis but with a straight forward and elementary exposition of the solution of equations, especially that of second degree. The Arabs in general loved a good clear argument from premise to conclusion, as well as systematic organization – respects in which neither Diophantus nor the Hindus excelled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi...

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. That's the last thing we need here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did you read the article? If you had, you might have noticed the phrase “Hindu-Arabic numerals“ being used. Shockingly, cultures do tend to build on the works of others.

The reason it is tagged “Islamic” is presumably because the golden age of Persian/Arabic science happened in unison with the early rise of Islam, along with a blooming of industry and culture in general. This may not have been coincidental. The early Islamic world was a lot more inquisitive and open-minded than the western world of the time. It wasn’t till a couple centuries later that reactionary religious conservatism gained the upper hand; and several centuries more before Europe would best its own reactionary religious conservatism in shape of the Renaissance.

Physicist Jim al-Khalili has written on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Pathfinders-Golden-Age-Arabic-Science...

(Also some documentaries if you want to search on Youtube.)

Please don't break the site guidelines as you did in your first paragraph. They ask commenters not to be snarky and to omit the "Did you read the article" trope.

The rest of your comment is wonderful. Unfortunately, introducing it in a hostile way creates a barrier that's more than just a speed bump. Mentioning in a friendly way the article refers to Hindu-Arabic numerals would make a much better intro.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So I should’ve phrased it as “You clearly didn’t read the article” then? Considering OP was transparently skating on the edge of Islamophobia, I think I was being kind.

No, that phrasing would break the guidelines even worse.

You weren't being kind. Kindness isn't relative to how bad another comment is or you feel it is. It's a quality of what you yourself respond with.

The rest of your comment was great, but if you begin by tweaking people, it's not reasonable to expect them to learn from the rest of what you write. They're just going to smart from the slap, and respond as badly or (probably) worse.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? We'd appreciate it. The idea is curious conversation, rather than the sniping and fault-finding (and worse) that dominates most of the internet.

Wanted to make a note of this, but decided to keep my mouth shut.

A Muslim couple find the vaccine for Covid-19 - https://bit.ly/33Ph2IV

It is surprising how the contemporary media notes accomplishments of Muslims by their faith, instead of nationality as would be the usual case, as though being a Muslim makes a person underprivileged or intellectually challenged in some way which makes their accomplishments more notable.

If you go back far enough in time and you'll see that all Muslims are descendants of non-Muslims. Why should they be any different from the descendants of their ancestors who did not adopt Islam?

"The soft bigotry of low expectations", not racism in this case. Muslims are not a race.

I wonder if it's not something coming from the muslim world itself.

Modern nations is a western concept and has mostly been shaped by western colonisation. Identity in many part of the world is more defined by ethnicity, tribe, or religion, than by the nationality.

Muslims have been divided along ethnic and ideological lines as much as Christians or any other ethnic or religious groups.

Trying labelling an Iranian as an Arab to his face and see the outcome. (hint, it never ends well)

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317810 and marked it off topic.

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar.

> That story begins in a palace library nearly a thousand years ago, at a time when most of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness.

Laughable revisionism already thoroughly debunked by Sylvain Gouguenheim many years ago. A real shame as it makes me doubt the objectivity of the entire article.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted so low that I had to vouch you up; but the concept of a western intellectual dark age has well and truly been contradicted by modern scholarship.

For further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#Mod...

It is contradicted by some modern scholarship, but it is by far not the consensus in the field. There are many scholars who do believe that Europe entered period of civilizational and intellectual decline for a number of centuries after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The debate is very much open on the issue.

I dislike invoking the idea of the "dark ages" as it's usually a misrepresentation of events. That said, Fibonacci is credited with spreading the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Western Europe, showing that at least in the area of mathematics they were in a relative darkness.

I hadn't heard of Gouguenheim but his ideas seem rather absurd. He seems to believe the Islamic golden age never occurred, and I can't find how he tries to explain where something like Liber Abbaci came from. His objectivity seems far more suspect than this piece.

Also, the Islamic Golden Age is not only about mathematics, but also about other sciences.

The chemistry progressed a lot during that time. Several preserved Arabic works contain a much improved classification of the known chemical substances, better than anything that existed before them.

That chemical classification was improved only in the 18th century, by several generations of Swedish chemists, leading eventually to the modern chemistry based on the notion of chemical elements, which was created by Lavoisier and his French colleagues, shortly before the French Revolution.

Attempting to deny the essential Arabic/Islamic contributions to the evolution of the sciences shows just ignorance or bad intentions.

I don't know where you are reading about his work, but his Aristote au mont Saint-Michel isn't about his ideas or beliefs, it's about providing historical evidence of significant intellectual developments in the early middle ages as well as translations of key ancient texts in French monasteries half a century before they were alledgedly imported from the Arab world, which completely changes the narrative of knowledge transmission. That's his main thesis as far as I can recall.

I wonder what Gouguenheim thinks about Porphyry’s Isagogy and its influence on the Arabs.

> A global shift away from Roman numerals underscores a creeping innumeracy in other aspects of life.

Sorry, what? How is knowledge of an obsolete number system important to numeracy?

Yeah this seems a bit silly. We are not ignorant buffoons because we can’t read latin. Sure, I could certainly read more things if I could read latin, but the same could be said for speaking french or knowing set theory. The author’s defence of different numbering systems as a means to gain insight is valid, but the extrapolation is silly.

Even better, since when did "the globe" use roman numerals to begin with? Did the chinese, indians, aztecs, persians, etc use roman numerals? When was there a "global" shift from roman numerals?

Ah, the accursed eurocentricism. Some people have to indulge in it even when they are writing a fluff piece about another culture they are trying to extol.

Its not even complete- not once mentioned sumerias influence- the whole base 6 numbers system. 0-360° 0-12-24 h in a day, etc..

Please don't post in the flamewar style here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

this thread made me feel bad for you dang. Keep up the hard and good work!

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