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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

I guess manipulating abstract terms is not natural to many people. It's probably a coincidence that only Europeans developed our modern formal systems, while all the other civilization happily chugged along without such formal systems.

Unfortunately, it is usually those who can think in abstraction can go along way in STEM fields.

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The Idea that modern formal systems are a European Invention is a common misconception, but nevertheless wrong. Depending on your definition of "modern formal systems" they were either first invented by the Babylonians, in India or in China but most certainly not in Europe, which at the time was at a much earlier state of development.

I meant the systematic thinking of axioms, theorems, and logical systems like syllogism. I don’t know about other countries, but I’m pretty sure India or China didn’t develop rigorous systems line Greeks and Arabics. They developed a lot of techniques, for sure, like how to solve equation systems, but certainly not generalizations like axioms-theorems-proofs

Politely, what are you talking about? Indian logic is considered one of the three original traditions of logic and has sources in 650 BCE.

I think he's talking about white supremacy

Algebra was an Arabic inventions.

Yeah, Arabic too. My bad. I was thinking about Greeks, and Khwarizmi wrote his algebra book al-jibr in medieval times circa AD 700 or 800. So I assumed that Arabic carried the heritage of Greeks before the Renaissance.

Khwarizmi was Persian, not Arabic.

Citation? The Islamic contribution to philosophy and mathematics is impressive but Arabs were always marginal. Many, many Persians, Greeks and other Christians and converts but very few Arabs of any note.

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