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Completely ignoring the fact that this Islamic mathematics reached the Islamic world from Hindu India. Also, I always find it interesting how every such articl
by yumraj 6y ago
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.
- disown 6y agoExcellent 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?
- dang 6y agoThey're probably referring to modernity in the historian's sense of post-Renaissance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period
- fastball 6y agoIs it really interesting? Outlets like BBC have been doing this for a long time now. Very clear agenda to try to make Islam look good.
- cle 6y agoIs there something wrong with pointing out its positive aspects? Personally I appreciate the counter balance to the last two decades of racist tropes.
- falseprofit 6y agoIslam isn't a race, and mathematics isn't a religious achievement.
- badconvincer 6y agoI would argue that Islam is not a race but it is almost entirely a non-white religion so there are some connotations there. Obviously the modern definition of white is socially constructed but it’s where we are currently.
- fastball 6y agoWhy does that matter? If you don't like a specific ideology that happens to be majority non-white, you're automatically a racist / criticism of it is automatically racist? There is nothing intrinsically wrong with North Africans, Arabs, Indonesians, etc, etc. There is a lot wrong with Islam. Just as there are problems with every religion. Islam's are just more severe. Islam is as worthy of defense as communism, which is to say – not very much.
- badconvincer 6y agoI’m not a fan of Islam myself but if I had to find reasons in its favor I would say it’s extremely unifying, offers contentment through absolute submission and fosters a martial sense in its adherents I find missing in a lot of religions. Additionally I feel like it is the religion that would be the most accepting of a scientific interpretation of the world if it can get past the modern Wahhabism that’s being spewed. The western world has also historically demonized people all over the world through various implicative means so it’s not surprising people are on guard when all you’re probably trying to do is be direct and straightforward. The key here is “probably”, I genuinely don’t know your motivations.
- Spooky23 6y agoTake the racist bullshit somewhere else.
- cle 6y ago
- fastball 6y agoYes. Just like it doesn't matter if a serial killer volunteered at the local food bank. This academy thrived because the people valued knowledge and the pursuit of it, not because they were Muslim.
- cle 6y agoI’m sorry did I claim that they thrived because they were Muslim? I like it because many people in my culture see Muslims as a single homogeneous race of evil, destructive people, and a lot of the discourse reflects that. That kind of categorization and generalization is obviously BS, and I think stories like this help demonstrate that.
- fastball 6y agoNo, the article is claiming that with its headline. That is the matter at hand in this subthread.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- john4532452 6y agoWhen the founder is a pedo its hard to look for postive things. By the way Hind caste system is even worse.
- tim333 6y ago99%+ of muslims are not that way and were born into it. So you can look at that stuff I guess.
- john4532452 6y agoMy point is why do you defend the religion. IMNHO well educated people defending ISLAM are the actual source of problem rather that the extremist. Extremists are honest and open about their view and can be barred from entering non islamic countries. OTOH moderate muslims can not be banned at the same time they silently support the ISLAM.
- tim333 6y agoDunno. It's complicated. The bible has lots of bits about killing homosexuals and us christians used to persecute Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. I guess the reasonable viewpoint is that christianity is not inherently evil but lay off the stonings etc. Likewise for islam.
- dang 6y agoReligious flamewar will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post anything like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319136 again.
- john4532452 6y agoOk. This one was a bit too far. I agree. But this is not https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319136 How to respond to the arguments that support religion and discourage it. PS: I am not just against ISLAM if that's what any one thinks(look at my past comments)
- bigbubba 6y agoMuch 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.
- hopw_roewur_ne 6y agoI 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.
- alphachloride 6y agoIt 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.
- ncmncm 6y agoGreek 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.
- rootsudo 6y agoPropaganda 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.
- yumraj 6y agoArabic numbers are actually Hindu numbers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral...
- tim333 6y agoThe "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.
- lopmotr 6y agoWhy 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.
- OrangeBlaze 6y agoMathematics in the Arab/Islamic was mainly built from Ancient Greece. Although there definitely seems to be an Indian influence.
- alphachloride 6y agoHow 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).
- emmelaich 6y agoThe 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.
- sudosysgen 6y agoBecause 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.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoNot all Perso-Arabic mathematics is Indian in origin
- scythe 6y agoIt'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#Contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi...
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. That's the last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hhas01 6y agoDid 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/dp/0141038365 https://www.amazon.com/Pathfinders-Golden-Age-Arabic-Science... (Also some documentaries if you want to search on Youtube.)
- dang 6y agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hhas01 6y agoSo 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.
- dang 6y agoNo, 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 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]