Comment by laxmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laxmin | Hacker News Reader

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For e.g. the Pythagorean theorem - that was independently discovered by many cultures centuries or even millennia before the Greek mathematician.

There is no need to refer it to his name, it could be the law of triangular squares or something (just an example, please do roast me for this)

Also, the theorem is is mentioned in the Baudhayana Sulba-sutra of India in almost the same structure, word for word, written between 800 and 400 BCE.

Today, it appears as if the Greeks are the fountainhead of all of western philosophy and world mathematics.

In education, the western civilisation is studied as an inverted pyramid. A large base of goodness and greatness with some badness towards the sharp peak thrown in.. like how the US is a country founded on principles of freedom while the bad parts like slavery is seen as a small aberration. Contrast it with the treatment of India in the western press, education and academia. The base of India is the bad bad casteism, poverty, snake charmers, millions of gods, some sort of pagan religion, etc which gets all the focus while small goodnesses hardly gets any mention. Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek - from Advaita to Nagarjuna's Buddhist nihilism - ever heard of these? Blame your education. If you have heard, kudos, you are a statistical outlier.

All this leads to the ingrained slant that we see on social media. India means rapists, poverty and what not. The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect.

This is just an example. Thanks for reading. Disagree if you must, but let's enjoy the freedom of expression.

[All hail the Internet. To the Human Brain and Evolution behind it, belongs all Glory.]

If people in Russian, or Spanish or Chinese or Indians want to call the Pythagorean theorem by any other name, let them, by all means, who cares? Let them print their own books, publish their own web pages and have them call it by whatever they want.

In English we get it from our own tradition, they can get it from their own. If they like they can very well make it up, who cares.

Is it racist if Indians or Chinese, or Egyptians have another names for it? Like who cares about where the nomenclature came from. They can call it frankfurter instead, or porkbun, who cares. In English we call it the Pythagorean theorem. We have our names, they have theirs.

What next, people who speak English remove any bible-inspired names and take up native names because using biblical names is racist by denying names 'native' to English? I guess Peter is out but William is in, right?

Wait, wait, to further decolonize the English language itself, we'll abandon the Latin alphabet and go back to Fuþark, better? Ah, decolonization!

100% agree. All of this whining about how people in the west have ignored traditions and discoveries from India or whatever is so...needy. If the west isn't that important, ignore us and do your own thing.

I agree that we should look at maths to see whether/where it’s racist, but don’t think the single example of Pythagoras is a strong enough argument.

Firstly, if I had to guess and put a race label on him, I wouldn’t guess he was white. He was (reportedly, we know very little of him) born on Samos, an island near the coast of Turkey.

Secondly, misnaming theorems and inventions happens all the times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misnamed_theorems has some examples from maths. See also https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626242-100-the-word..., https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14461-five-scientific..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Also: “Nobody knows about Indian systems of philosophy which is richer than the Greek”? I think nobody knows of Greek systems of philosophy, either. “Democracy” is about the only thing, and that’s severely mangled/improved from Athenian reality, where the overwhelming majority of the population didn’t have a vote.

And “The leftist academia dismisses all of India as unworthy of respect.”, IMO, is not a fair statement. Certainly, in the 1960s and 1970s leftish academia admired some aspects of India. That has decreased a bit, but I don’t think it has fully gone away.

But yes, history is written by the winners, and Europe happened to start the scientific revolution, while having better access to Greek and Arabic texts (who gave them not only the words algebra and algorithm) than to Indian ones.

The Greeks were the first, to my knowledge, who discovered the need for mathematical proof. Egyptians, Babylonians, etc. probably knew about the pythagorean theorem, but they didn't prove it or felt that they had to (that we know of).

FWIW, Pythagoras's connection to the theorem is also disputed, but here we might just be dealing with a lack of sources. The first known proof appears in Euclid's Elements.

> There is no need to refer it to his name [...]

Due to the highly abstract nature of maths, names in mathematics are often very arbitrary, and the first thing that sticks, sticks. Fields are called "bodies" in German, but they denote the same thing (and both of these labels are very arbitrary). There's multiple things that get called "ring" and have nothing to do with each other. And many objects or theorems are named after people who had little to do with them due to misattribution, for example, Pell's equation has nothing to do with John Pell.

FWIW, there are many things named after Indian or Arab mathematicians, and there is also the (rather important) "Chinese Remainder Theorem".

I think a large part of why certain regions get get credit for things is because they are better at marketing themselves. Assuming what you say is true about Indias achievements, I would think that they should at least be recognised by their neighbours. If your achievements are only acknowledged by yourself, then racism probably isn't the cause. Purely anecdotal but I've never heard an Indian person talking up their country and pointing to its achievements like you are, whereas people from my small country will not miss an opportunity to tell you how great we are and we claim credit for everything.

I genuinely can't tell if this guy is trolling.

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