Islamic Achievements in Math was 500 Years Ahead of the West

Originally posted by Dragonlike

They made very little advancement on the advances they took from their defeated subjects. In fact, Islam never grew on anything. They stayed at the same level, while other empires grew and advanced.

It's becouse the never affected by the movement of atheism. When the Europeans abandoned their religious addiction, they thrived. Muslims on the other hand remained sticked to their religion.
The good things that the Arabian world did to Europeans was to offer them all the preserved knowledge to Europeans and signs the horns of the enlightment.

Religion always see things from a negative and traditional way of thinking towards anything new.

EXACTLY.

Europe began to break from the rule of the church and return to the classical inspirations of greece and Rome.

The Middle East continues to fester in the dark ages because they still are attatched to the teat of islamic rule.

Religon isnt a bad thing. The greeks and Romans were religous. they just didnt let it totally rule their lives with a set of backwards rules.

OK Let's learn from the past and understand the present and look t5o the future.

Great Past!

Unpredictable present!

Untold future.

I can only see a march backwards for this area of the world and question the followings of this religion.

Christians are evolving and have changed over the last 2000 + years.

But I ask if Islam has progressed to where there is tolerance, religous freedom, freedom of dessent, womenn rights and many more.

I question whether people who don't understand basic health issues, no offense, have the desire to evolve reather than descend or stay in the 5th century.

I really question the need for any religion who at this time profess death to infidels, and martyrdom to attain a better"LIFE?"

Originally posted by Souljah

Originally posted by XphilesPhan
Well, apparently you havent been very well educated or you would know tht Isaac Newton did do something "new." Did you not read where I told you he invented calculus? besides earlier works by kepler and gallileo, he proposed the fundamental force in the universe known as gravity!

So mister Newton "invented" calculus all by himself?

Nobody before him tried?

He just started from scratch?

Calculus

The history of calculus falls into several distinct periods, most notably the Greek, Indian, and European periods.

The Greek period introduced some of the ideas of integral calculus, but does not seem to have developed these ideas in a rigorous or systematic way. Eudoxus (circa 408 BCE - circa 355 BCE) used the method of exhaustion, which prefigures the concept of the limit, to calculate areas and volumes. Archimedes (circa 287 BCE - 212 BCE) developed this idea further, inventing heuristics which resemble integral calculus.

Indian mathematics, largely unknown in the west until the 20th century, produced a number of works with some ideas of calculus. The mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata in 499 CE used a notion of infinitesimals and expressed an astronomical problem in the form of a basic differential equation.

Manjula, in the 10th century, elaborated on this differential equation in a commentary. This equation eventually led Bhaskara in the 12th century to develop a proto-derivative representing infinitesimal change, and describe an early form of "Rolle's theorem".

In the 14th century, Madhava, along with other mathematician-astronomers of the Kerala School, described special cases of Taylor series which are treated in the text Yuktibhasa.

It has been recently conjectured that the discoveries of the Kerala School were transmitted to Europe.

Interesting no?

And the fact that you claim Newton "invented" all by himself is also not correct:

History of calculus

In the 15th century, a German cardinal named Nicholas of Cusa argued that rules made for finite quantities lose their validity when applied to infinite ones, thus putting to rest Zeno's paradoxes.

In 17th century Europe, Isaac Barrow, Pierre de Fermat, Blaise Pascal, John Wallis and others discussed the idea of a derivative.

René Descartes introduced the foundation for the methods of analytic geometry in 1637, providing the foundation for calculus later introduced by Isaac Newton AND Gottfried Leibniz, independently of each other.

Historically, there was much debate over whether it was Newton or Leibniz who first "invented" calculus. This argument, the Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy between the German Leibniz and the English Newton, was at the heart of a rift in the mathematical community of the two countries. Much of the credit for the resolution goes to the Analytical Society.

Yet you know that mister Newston "invented" calculus all by himself - at least you write about him like that, as if so many scientists that worked on that same topic centuries before him, do not mean anything. Like mister Gottfried Leibniz for example - you did not mention his name and he is probably as important when talking about calculus as Newton is.

And what's about that knowledge from Kerala School were transmitted to Europe?

[edit on 24/2/07 by Souljah]

This is a bogus revisionist history in my opinion.

Newton certainly did know about the predecessors in Europe, and although it is important, their work cannot be considered calculus. There's no evidence that I've ever heard of that the Indian work was known at all to Newton. Speculating about the meaning of a "derivative" as a slope of curve was there even since Antiquity and the notion of limits at least somewhat understood by many. The descriptions in the Wikipedia of the Indian results were 'qualified', "a special case of a Taylor series". Certainly impressive for the time, but not remotely what Newton & Leibnitz did, and what they enabled. And also look at the amount of time that passed.

What matters is things like the specific, concrete, manipulations and theorems, fundamental theorem of calculus, differential equations, and the more subtle variational equations. Discussing the idea of a derivative isn't worth very much---when you can integrate equations of motion and understand the implications, then you have invented calculus worth a damn.

What is clear is that Newton, in 20 or thirty years, certainly exceeded the the rate of Indian and Western mathematical development over a few centuries. Undoubtably there was some knowledge of ideas relating to derivatives. What matters is solving them. Among his contemporaries even some claimed that half of the mathematics known to them was Newton's.

Leibnitz was important and did co-invent the primary modern concepts of calculus.

Newton's importance was understanding the relationship of calculus to physics. Calculus was just a modest part of Newton's invention---the key understanding was putting physics on the modern understanding, specifically the notion of "state variables" and dynamics thereof governed by differential equations. On this, Newton does appear to be primary originator. In many real senses, there was no such thing as physics before Newton, and since then the essential nature of the description of the physical world (time evolution of differential equations representing state) is universal. This basic idea was not clearly understood before Newton.

For example, pre-Newton (or Leibnitz) was anybody able to integrate potential from a spherically symmetric gravitating body and conclude that it gives an effect equal to a point mass outside its boundary? Discussing the notion of a derivative doesn't get you there. Knowing calculus and a fair amount of it does.

One can look at the explosion of interest and understanding post-Newton as to pre-Newton to accurately gauge his influence. Leibnitz set the path for modern mathematical notation and description (and co-invented the principal concepts independently), Newton set the path for the motivation and physical interpretation, plus a whole lot more.

Yea and that was the end of their advance, they are still there. The west has moved on. We have learnt there ain't no god, whatever you call him.

In the 500 years you mention the mussies are still a bunch of misogynist, wife beaters, who throw stones at a stone (representing the Devil), walk about a bit and worship a so called prophet more than they worship the Jewish god they follow.

The west has moved on baby, you stick with the nostalgia and your faith in god. We'll stick to our liberal, free society and our faith in nuclear weapons

It is a puzzle to me how a faith that follows a child molesting, paedophilic, uneducated, mentally ill nomad could produce some advances in the logical arts and systems.

I think really though that the whole primitive, stone age attitude of islam is a clever ploy, because when we bomb you back into the stone age, it won't make any difference

Yeah, that's a puzzle to me too, but you better ask who threw the first stone. A hint can be found in the mentality of the above poster.

To shed light on the cultural heritage of Islam was my intentions by submitting this news. To put it in a truer and most of all less prejudicial light than that common to average Westerners.

Through media and political fear-mongering we have come to believe Islam to be backward, cruel and savage. Of course educated people will know this not to be true, though hardly any in the light of the present day ME conflict can claim to be unbiased, myself included.

My own perception of Islam is highly biased by experiences I had when I as a young man some forty years ago traveled the Mideast, South Asia and North Africa. The beauty and serenity, the tranquility in the decorations and architecture of the great mosques, as I saw them in Fes, Meknes, Meshad, Herat and a lot of other places was not only breathtaking but astonishing to perceive, it was most of all highly meditative. Only a culture fully equal to the one that created the great domes of Europe could have created this. But where those can have a rigour and austerity meant to evoke humbleness, they can to less devoted souls bring about a feeling of coldness. I never had such feeling visiting mosques. The tiling was to me the most intriguing part, not only found in mosques, but in secular building as well.

To explain the present day decline of Islamic culture I think one must look at the application of the innovative skills. In the Islamic world they seem applied for pure pleasure of the senses, were as in our rigid belief-system nothing seems to have value unless it can be turned into money. Somehow the number one merit in Protestantism is profit making. The diligence by which this is pursued makes us prosper ...at the cost of others to suffer. In other religions equilibrium rather than gain is prevailing.

I think it is a very wrong perception of the people following Islam to be backward desert dwellers, stone age tribes if some posters here were to be believed, with nothing much better to do than goat herding. The 400 year span from the prophet appeared till Islam reached is peak doesn't advocate such views. I admit to be ignorant as to what the Semitic people actually were before the introduction of Islam. I know the Persians had a high culture centuries prior to conversion. But with ME culture going back some 5000 years I just don't believe present day prejudices about the people of the Arabian peninsular. As for their present state of "backwardness" repression and persecution from the West is to blame, IMO.

Let me just give one example of the liberated mind of Islam by mentioning The Perfumed Garden by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi, an erotic text published in the early sixties in the West and immediately banned as pornographic, but nontheless together with Fanny Hill what finally broke the taboo on sex as well as the ban on porn. It's just out of mind to think it is actually a 15th century Arabic text, probably revered and widespread in the Islamic world at the time. How it is gone from there to present day bigotry I just don't get.

I highly recommend Christopher Alexander's 4 books the "Nature of Order"...

(The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground)

... he discusses these very tiles and the art/science that went into designing them in some detail. Fascinating books, fascinating author....architect.

"A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets" by Alexander is also a very interesting discussion of how design happens.

Then of course there is "A Pattern Language" with which you can redesign a city or design a window seat.... but it does not touch on tiles such as then where the Nature of Order does.

There are ignorant people everywhere and a lot of them have computers.

If you do not want to remain ignorant about the world around you and especially the middle east you could not go wrong reading Karen Armstrong, a former nun and scholar of religion.

Most specifically there are her books "Islam; a short history"...."Muhammad; a prophet for our time".... "Holy War; a history of the crusades and their impact in the modern world"..."The Battle for God: a history of fundamentalism" and "The History of God'.

That is assuming that those such as trouble shooter, and others who post such ignorant and belligerent posts as can understand ideas to begin with.

[edit on 24-2-2007 by grover]

Originally posted by T Trubballshoota
It is a puzzle to me how a faith that follows a child molesting, paedophilic, uneducated, mentally ill nomad could produce some advances in the logical arts and systems.

Considering that Abraham was a homeless dude who got his maid preggers, then banished her and his kid, and then heard a weird voice and decided to tie up and sacrifice his own son, I don't think that mohammeds alleged predilictions are really relevant.

Also just updating Celtic art is the nearest thing to this art I can think of that predates and looks similar and has similar detail and pattern shapes in art with interlasing lines.

I have not gone into this subject fully but why just lines and patterns and no figurative art. I guess figurative art of the human body or animals were banned and still maybe are due to being idols. No wonder these lines ended up in circles because like the Arabic writing styles I only see creative trends that do not involve anything that represents earthly nature.
Don't forget some knowledge could have been taken or adopted by culture that was eventually destroyed by Muslims. When the secret of the pyramids were apparently displayed on the surface of the stones the outer marble carved coating was destroyed and used for Mosque building. Also ancient knowledge from the Alexandria library was destroyed again some historical sources say Muslims used the library books as fuel. But Greek knowledge is also found its influence in the Koran and maybe some influence of artwork could have been copied or extended. This is a theory that maybe other cultures had influence that could have disappeared with desecration of history that was seen as invalid and worthy of destroying, as it did not fit into Islam. Even so all cultures had art and even the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Egyptians gave fine details in their art too, but mathamitically did they make eqautions and have answers to why things were or did the shapes take trial and error without question what mathamitically works and how to apply it to anything else?. Remember this is just questions and opinion, some one mentioned algebra.
www.ucs.louisiana.edu...
This site forgot Hebrew letters and words used as the same in maths, which apparently predates Egypt.

[edit on 24-2-2007 by The time lord]

[edit on 24-2-2007 by The time lord]

Originally posted by khunmoon
In the Islamic world they seem applied for pure pleasure of the senses, were as in our rigid belief-system nothing seems to have value unless it can be turned into money.

I don't think that that is really accurate though. It is interesting to note that the high wisdom of the classical era results in advances in philosophy and the arts within the Islamic world, but then when that work is rediscovered in the west, it ends up yeilding the scientific, capitalist, modern world.

BUT, this isn't really accurate. When that knowledge was rediscovered in the west, it lead to the rennaisance, which was primarily a revolution in the arts. It was only with through the enlightenment and the specific conditions that were in europe at that time that lead to it becoming the age of reason, or the modern, capitalist, scientific world.

THe classical knowledge wasn't simply pre-set to incubate and grow, given enough attention and time in a culture, into the Age of Reason. After all, it never resulted in actual science in the classical era, so why should it magically do so amoung the muslims, or even amoung the europeans? It was the specific conditions of that time and place that resulted in make the really big leap into the scientific world.

As far as capitalism itself, in part it really is just an extension of self-interest and individualism, which have existed at all times and in all places, but arent' considered high virtues in the classical islamic world.

If we moderns have turned that into being money grubbing sheep, well thats not really the fault of the enlightenement.

Originally posted by Nygdan
As far as capitalism itself, in part it really is just an extension of self-interest and individualism, which have existed at all times and in all places, but arent' considered high virtues in the classical islamic world.

Your initial statement I find true, but the concept of the Self and thus the birth of modern man wasn't introduced before the Renaissance and didn't even spread down through the populace before the age of reason, finally to be put in definitions by Sigmund Freud.

I still remember old folks from my childhood never to speak in first person. They would say: "one would", were we say "I would". That was people born in the last half of the 1800's. So I do think the perception of the individual as an individual is a quiet recent thing been under way for only a few hundred years. But it was perceived in the Renaissance. Before that people saw themselves as part of a bigger entity.

When Shakespeare put down on paper "to be or not to be" it was going to shake and change the world. Before that people were "not to be" anything but creatures of God or the Crown or whomever they answered too.

Now I wonder, did the Muslims have that perception of "I", of being an individual, before we did?

While the west was wallowing in mud huts after the fall of the western half of Rome; Cordoba, Damascus, Baghdad and Samarkand were the intellectual centers of the world.

They had never lost the works of Plato, Aristotle and the other ancient philosophers; not to mention they had access to the works of the Indian sages who gave us such things as the concept and symbol of zero (without which Newton could not have done his work on calculus) and the numerical system that we use to this day. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. is a hell of a lot easier to use than I, II, III, IV, V etc.

So yes the mathematical ideas had spread to the west from India via Islam and Arab culture and so to Newton.

Cordoba was the light of Europe during the middle ages and many scholars went there to study and to escape the ignorance and religious intolerance of Europe at the time. What they learned there helped fuel the high middle ages, just as scholars (and the material they brought with them) fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the turks, helped fuel the Renaissance a couple hundred years later.

Newton simply could not have done what he did without the work that came before him and that included both Arab and Indian mathematics.

These tiles we are discussing were a specific response to a religious dictate, not to adorn religious centers with graven images. there is always the urge to decorate and to make beautiful but Muhammad's injunction was in response to the heavily statued churches of Rome and Byzantium, which both the Jews and Muslims thought (and still think) smacks of Idolatry. So these "arabesques" were created.

What is so sad is that the Arab world was severely crippled by the Mongol invasions from the great Khans to Tamerlane to the Turks and never fully recovered from it and retreated into a rigid conservatism, a conservatism we see reflected today is the worst of Islam... which many in the west have come to imagine is Islam without considering its richness and contributions to humanity.

And it is that in the long run what is important. These tiles are not an Arab or Muslim achievement, they are a human achievement, something we should all be proud of and count as part of our great patrimony and heritage as human beings.

I would much rather an alien from another planet be exposed to something like these tiles as an example of the finest humanity has to offer, as opposed to the ignorant rantings from someone like troubleshooter and his ilk.

WoWzErS!



Now there certain are people, who just want to refuse, that Islamic scientists were at some point in Human History better then Western ones. Now why is that so hard to swallow? Does your pride not let you to swallow something Islamic? I mean, you are just fooling yourself - and if you like to lie to yourself, then I wonder what you see when you look into your mirror?

Anyway, just to get the record straight - here are some FACTS; Spit or Swallow, I do not care:

Setting the Record Straight: The Miracle of Islamic Science

• What is Taught: The first mention of man in flight was by Roger Bacon, who drew a flying apparatus. Leonardo da Vinci also conceived of airborne transport and drew several prototypes.
  What Should be Taught: Ibn Firnas of Islamic Spain invented, constructed and tested a flying machine in the 800's A.D. Roger Bacon learned of flying machines from Arabic references to Ibn Firnas' machine. The latter's invention antedates Bacon by 500 years and Da Vinci by some 700 years.
  
  
• What is Taught: Glass mirrors were first produced in 1291 in Venice.
  What Should be Taught: Glass mirrors were in use in Islamic Spain as early as the 11th century. The Venetians learned of the art of fine glass production from Syrian artisans during the 9th and 10th centuries.
  
  
• What is Taught: Until the 14th century, the only type of clock available was the water clock. In 1335, a large mechanical clock was erected in Milan, Italy. This was possibly the first weight-driven clock.
  What Should be Taught: A variety of mechanical clocks were produced by Spanish Muslim engineers, both large and small, and this knowledge was transmitted to Europe through Latin translations of Islamic books on mechanics. These clocks were weight-driven.
  
  
• What is Taught: In the 17th century, the pendulum was developed by Galileo during his teenage years. He noticed a chandelier swaying as it was being blown by the wind. As a result, he went home and invented the pendulum.
  What Should be Taught: The pendulum was discovered by Ibn Yunus al-Masri during the 10th century, who was the first to study and document its oscillatory motion. Its value for use in clocks was introduced by Muslim physicists during the 15th century.
  
  
• What is Taught: Isaac Newton's 17th century study of lenses, light and prisms forms the foundation of the modern science of optics.
  What Should be Taught: In the 1lth century al-Haytham determined virtually everything that Newton advanced regarding optics centuries prior and is regarded by numerous authorities as the "founder of optics. " There is little doubt that Newton was influenced by him. Al-Haytham was the most quoted physicist of the Middle Ages. His works were utilized and quoted by a greater number of European scholars during the 16th and 17th centuries than those of Newton and Galileo combined.
  
  
• What is Taught: Isaac Newton, during the 17th century, discovered that white light consists of various rays of colored light.
  What Should be Taught: This discovery was made in its entirety by al-Haytham (1lth century) and Kamal ad-Din (14th century). Newton did make original discoveries, but this was not one of them.
  
  
• What is Taught: The first man to utilize algebraic symbols was the French mathematician, Francois Vieta. In 1591, he wrote an algebra book describing equations with letters such as the now familiar x and y's. Asimov says that this discovery had an impact similar to the progression from Roman numerals to Arabic numbers.
  What Should be Taught: Muslim mathematicians, the inventors of algebra, introduced the concept of using letters for unknown variables in equations as early as the 9th century A.D. Through this system, they solved a variety of complex equations, including quadratic and cubic equations. They used symbols to develop and perfect the binomial theorem.
  
  
• What is Taught: In 1614, John Napier invented logarithms and logarithmic tables.
  What Should be Taught: Muslim mathematicians invented logarithms and produced logarithmic tables several centuries prior. Such tables were common in the Islamic world as early as the 13th century.
  
  
• What is Taught: Robert Boyle, in the 17th century, originated the science of chemistry.
  What Should be Taught: A variety of Muslim chemists, including ar-Razi, al-Jabr, al-Biruni and al-Kindi, performed scientific experiments in chemistry some 700 years prior to Boyle. Durant writes that the Muslims introduced the experimental method to this science. Humboldt regards the Muslims as the founders of chemistry.

Just a Few cases of Islamic Science againts Western Science - and there sure is plenty more listed on the link above. Funny how many times mister Newton is mentioned, as if he "invented" many things, but actually most of those were already used a couple of hundred years before him.

So let us see where this ignorance towards Islamic Science comes from.

A few Quotes for You:

ISLAMIC WORLD AND THE WESTERN RENAISSANCE

• "Westerners - Europeans - have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab [Islamic] world, or that the Arabs [Muslims] were central to the making of medieval Europe" (Maria Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History; 1987; p.xiii). Two notable contemporary exceptions are: Carl Sagan, the Nobel laureate astronomer (Princeton University) and John Esposito, Director, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. Both have candidly talked of West's Judeo-Christian-and-Islamic heritage. Esposito talked of this heritage recently, and added, "Nobody ever told me that," and that he "was always taught the linkages between Judaism and Chistianity..."
  (CNN, 12/15/95)
  
  
• "No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam looming in the background."
  Pierce Butler, "Fifteenth Century of Arabic Authors in Latin Translation, in the McDonald Presentation Volume; Freeport, N.Y., 1933; p.63)
  
  
• "One of the hallmarks of civilized man is knowledge of the past - [including]the past of others with whom one's own culture has had repeated and fruitful contact; or the past of any group that has contributed to the ascent of man. The Arabs fit profoundly into both of the latter two categories. But in the West the Arabs are not well known. Victims of ignorance as well as misinformation, they and their culture have often been stigmatized from afar"
  (John Hayes, The Genius of Arab Civilization: Source of Renaissance; MIT Press, 1983; p. 2)
  
  
• "The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe, as, before long, Christendom will have to confess; he has indelibly written it on the heavens, as anyone may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe."
  (John W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Harper & Row; Vol.2, 1876 & 1904; p.42)

So I can see where this ignorance comes from - and I just can not blame the members of some certain posts here, since they are as manipulated, as everybody who walks blindly is. These quotes sure fit well to some posts written here and they tell a lot about, how the West wanted to be always seen as superior towards the Middle East - yet in the meantime the West actually stole a whole bunch of inventions and science developments from the Islamic Scientists. So that is why the Westerners have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Muslims scientists, who have been living in center of civilization at the days of Dark Ages in Europe, and did encourage learning of all kinds. Schools, colleges, libraries, observatories and hospitals were built throughout the whole Islamic state, and were adequately staffed and endowed. How many schools were at that time in Dark Age Europe? Who was the ONLY one doing all the reading and the writing? The CHURCH of course had a monopoly on Knowledge and did not allow a small man, a simple man to become actually learn something. How many observatories were in Europe in 8th century AD? How many Libraries, open to everybody who wants to read? How many Colleges? How many Hospitals? And while we are talking about hospitals, Europe at last began to establish hospitals, they were inspired by the Arabs of near East: the first hospital in Paris, Les Quinze-vingt, was founded by Louis IX after his return from the crusade 1254-1260. So you see that prior the Crusades, the Dark Aged Europe was just a bunch of Ignorant Monarchs and Dumbified Slaves, who worked for them, and died for them, while they collected their money, what the Church did not take from them already.

Yet people today still want to deny all of that - when Europe actually had to wait until RENAISSANCE for their time of Science to come; because before that time, they would all have been burned or tortured by the Church for spreading Evil Satanistic knowledge. That is why the Freemasons were hiding from the Church, since they were the only brave enough to actually start to learn something new, and they were aware of the fact, that if they are caught with their manuscripts, they would be soon going to meet their maker.

In fact the Islamic medicine and science actually ILLUMINATED the severe Dark Ages of Europe at that time, and we must be thankful for their input in this field.

But I think we are yet again pushed into a Dark Age, which is extremly HATEFUL towards an entire Religion. War on Islam is working very well.

[edit on 25/2/07 by Souljah]

Excellent post souljah excellent. You provide details to what I was talking about. There is a long bias against Islam in the west that is rooted in religious prejudice and cultural bias, neither of which have any validity whatsoever except to the ignorant.

Excellent summary, grover! If I had any more wats I'd given you.

Originally posted by grover

They had never lost the works of Plato, Aristotle and the other ancient philosophers; not to mention they had access to the works of the Indian sages who gave us such things as the concept and symbol of zero (without which Newton could not have done his work on calculus) and the numerical system that we use to this day. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. is a hell of a lot easier to use than I, II, III, IV, V etc.

So yes the mathematical ideas had spread to the west from India via Islam and Arab culture and so to Newton.

You get the part with the zero and the numbers we have thanks to Islam.

You imaging if we still did calculations with Roman numerals? -- wonder what Windows would look like then.

About the zero I remember long time ago to have read in the local paper about a UNICEF drawing contest run in school of most countries of the world.

The commission for it was: Illustrate the Number Zero.

I wish I remembered some of the drawings. But the trend was where kids in India would use images like flowers, deities and other positive things, the kids in West would use images often depicting themselves or family in sad mood.

Tells something.

Please don't ask me for links, they probably don't have online archives.

Edit to applaud Souljah.

Great post, great link!! --Thanx 4 sharing--

[edit on 25-2-2007 by khunmoon]

Originally posted by djohnsto77
From the article:

Joshua Socolar, a Duke university physicist, said it is unclear whether the medieval Islamic artisans fully understood the mathematical properties of the patterns they were making.

"It leads you to wonder whether they kind of got lucky," Socolar said in an interview. "But the fact remains that the patterns are tantalizingly close to having the structure that Penrose discovered in the mid-70s."

I think the far more likely explanation is that these craft tiles are simply the work of brilliant artists, not brilliant mathematicians. While it's true Islamic scholars did continue to build on Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics while Europe was in the dark ages, their work remains and I don't think there's anything that indicates that they made any true breakthroughs. Trying to divine that they knew far more about math from patterns of tiles than what's revealed in their writings seems like a pseudoscience to me.

I disagree. I make a lot of quilts, which are much like making tiles, in that you are putting peices of matierial together.

There is tons of math that goes into that.

First off you have to measure how big you want it to be, and then define how big each peice should be in order to fit that.

You have to calculate what angles the peices should be cut at to fit together, or if it is a curved peice, what the angle of the curve (I don't know the word) should be.

This has to be absolutely precise as any mistake, even a small one, gets mesed up over and over again.

To complicate things more, you have to add a seam allowance... so you have to calculate the finished dimensions, plus a secont set of measurements for how big the thing woul be when it is cut out.

For times, you would calculate the finished measurement, minus sp[ace for grouting.

Now... YOU go and design a quilt or a tile floor, and tell me your head doesn't expload with the math.

Excellent topic, a real eye opener for all t hose who wish to learn, rather than let the ignornace guide them.

Arabs and Islam are responsible for many scientfic breakthroughs, many of which have only been confirmed in recent times, thanks to modern breakthroughs.

One example is how the quran states, that an unborn child resembles chewed gum in the womb, only in modern times have we confirmed that a developing embryo, does indeed resemble chewed gum. This from a time when they did not posess the technical ability to know this through science alone. Makes you think, wether there is truth to the Quran and where this information came from, human or divine?

People should always learn for them self, rather than just take everything they are taught by state education for truth. If you cannot ask questions and learn for yourself, then you are a truely lost sole, a human cattle, ready to do as your masters wish, in this case, the western governments.

But as they say, ignorance is bliss.

[edit on 17-1-2009 by Saf85]

Originally posted by Saf85
Excellent topic, a real eye opener for all t hose who wish to learn, rather than let the ignornace guide them.

Arabs and Islam are responsible for many scientfic breakthroughs, many of which have only been confirmed in recent times, thanks to modern breakthroughs.

But, as stated in the OP, that was a long time ago. Over 500 years, and that's being nice. the West has moved upward and beyond, while the muslims have stayed static, or even regressed. Why? Many would point the finger directly at religion. The West was able to throw off the yoke of repressive religion and move on to much greater scientific and social understanding while muslims continue to wallow in theirs to this very day.

So, what's the point of this thread? Unless it is merely a vehicle for some to be able to say, "My team was #1". Even if it was so long ago that no one remembers how or why ...

reply to post by centurion1211


The decay and stasis set in after the Mongols razed the capital of the Caliphate, Baghdad with the House of Wisdom.

When the Turks took over in the aftermath they could really care less about what the Arabs had accomplished. They were more worried about laying siege to Constantinople and later Vienna, than any real civilized progress.