[linkmotif]

I’m so tired of hearing about Algebra in this context. The notion that Algebra was discovered uniquely in one place is absurd. There can be no doubt Algebra was discovered repeatedly all over the world, and if or when civilization collapses it’ll be discovered again in no time because: it’s Algebra. People are going to discover it and will create notations that make it easy to perform. People like Gauss and Newton arise from all civilizations. So please enough with Algebra. It’s also like almost a thousand years old at this point if you want to point out valuable contributions from the Middle East please refer to something more current and less cliched than Algebra it really just devalues your point.

[pimmen]

The point of bringing up algebra is not to somehow suggest that the Middle East today produces just as much good science and math as Europe or the US does today, or saying that it could only have been discovered in the Middle East, it's to educate people that the most dominant culture has shifted all the time throughout history and to somehow claim that Western culture is the apex of human history and that it could only have been the product of Europeans is extremely ignorant. The 250 years of rapid industrialization in the West is about 2.5% of the time from when humanity started the Agricultural revolution (which started in the Middle East).

What determines which culture will be the most dominant one is not one single factor, and some of them look completely random. For example, China invented movable type printing before Europe but Europe had an alphabet of discrete symbols that were optimized for stone engravings while China's alphabet was optimized for writing by hand quickly and with room for expression. That was one of the factors of why Europe could start the printing press revolution to democratize science and information.

I'm lucky to be living in Sweden in 2017, I would however want to move if this would've been 6th century Sweden.

[woodruffw]

I think you flipped the point on its end.

Of course al-Khwarizmi wasn't the first or only person to "discover" algebra - he was building off of 2000 years of Greek, Persian, Arab, and Indian work.

The point wasn't that he's another great man[1], but that it's simply incorrect to talk about "Western science and technology" as if they're either isolated or monolithic -- they're neither.

If al-Khwarizmi hadn't have been Latinized and become the reference for Western mathematics until the Renaissance, then someone else would have. But that someone else would have come from the "Eastern" world, simply by virtue of where the relevant research and academic tradition was at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory