Three things that surprised me!

  My three surprising points from the reading are:

The Book's Title: First, the title is a metaphor taken from the ancient Indian text, which compares the supreme importance of mathematics to the crests on a peacock's head—showing that modern mathematics is a collective achievement built upon contributions from diverse non-European civilizations.

Persian Scholars: Second, Iranian scientists like Ibn Sina and al-Khwarizmi were introduced as Arab, even though both of them are Iranian, and the reason their works are in Arabic is that they lived during the period after the Arab invasion of Iran, when Islam was a religion imposed on Iranians and the language of scientific texts changed to Arabic in many cases.

Solving Equations: Al-Khwarizmi's basic methods of balancing and simplifying equations (known as al-jabr and al-muqabala) are still the core rules we use today to solve algebra problems and create computer algorithms.

Comments

  1. Susan Gerofsky23 September 2026 at 12:08

    A very good point about these amazing Persian mathematicians/ polymaths!

    ReplyDelete

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