" The Crest of the Peacock", what a beautiful and miracle book. When I read it, I feel like entering another world. From Egypt and Mesopotamia to Europe, from the Dark Ages to Renaissance, plenty of pictures appear in my mind. Mathematics as the bridges connect these cultural areas and eras, and also connect me and you. 
The four-thousand-year-old Babylonian clay tablet with the value of n^3+n^2 struck me. This clay tablet implies that "Babylonians may have used these values in solving cubic equations ". I wonder how and why they invented it. Is it used for calculating the orbit of stars or trying to figure out the relationship between tracks of sun and moon?
When I read about the cross-cultural contact between India and China, I recalled a famous classical historic Chinese novel named "Journey to the West". This story is about a Tang dynasty Buddhist monk traveled to India to find Buddhist scriptures. This novel is so popular that most of Chinese have read it. It is also an evidence of a cross-cultural contact between India and China. In Yuan dynasty, a Chinese mathematician Zhu Shi Jie wrote a Math Book. Some every large numbers used in this book were from India's Buddhist scriptures.
One of the features of mathematical activity through the ages makes me feel admiration for ancient mathematicians' spirit of pursuing knowledge. This feature is stated as "the relative ineffectiveness of cultural barriers(or 'filters') in inhibiting the transmission of mathematical knowledge." Around 2500 years ago, Greek Mathematicians such as Pythagoras and Eudoxus need to travel on foot to another country to learn knowledge. One can imagine their journey must be full of difficulties. Nowadays, people could work and learn online at home, and obtain many resources remotely. We should cherish what we have today, and remember what they have done for us yesterday.
Link of the book:
What a fascinating post, Cheryl! I am also a big fan of the Journey to the West, and Monkey and Piggy, and all that it teaches us about the Buddhist missionaries from India to China in the T'ang Dynasty. It is so interesting to see that mathematics was also shared and transmitted in these journeys! I'm glad that you picked up on Babylonian connections with polynomial functions, and on the amount of interaction there was among cultural groups even in ancient times!
ReplyDelete