Muslims - "Islam invented algebra." Nope, the ancient

>>8962339
Algebra was not invented in the Medieval Islamic world, but was greatly developed there.Moreover, your same line of reasoning could be used to discredit the Ancient Greeks for a number of mathematical discoveries, especially in geometry, where Egypt was often the source. In the end, who discovered what doesn't matter in the slightest. What's important is that we continue to build on the discoveries of our predecessors.

>>8962339
>their non-Muslim (possible) ancestors
>(possible)
AHAHA, anyway

you are retarded if you take credit for achievements of your ancestors when you had nothing to do with them, i agree there

Just because a more ancient civilization did it first, doesn't mean other independent inventions aren't valid. Though, muslim scholars borrowed heavily from the greeks who themselves borrowed heavily from the Egyptians and Babylonians.

>>8962339
You're right, the Jews invented Steve's. Jews invented everything and white people steal all the credit.

>>8962436
muslim ''''''''''''''scholars'''''''''''''

>>8962339
Looks like arithmetic; how is this Al Gebra?

>>8962339
This thread belongs in history and humanities.

thanks hiro for adding the maths captchas that have been asked for hundreds of times to stop these threads and not instead adding dozens of shit features and boards that nobody asked for or wants

>>8962470

Ancient texts verbally and contextually referred to unknown quantities without using a shorthand like "x"; "a quantity has two subtracted from it and then gives eighteen, so what is the quantity? I say that it is twenty, for..." This is how this stuff actually reads when you either decode or translate it. Rhind Papyrus gives a concrete example of this sort of thing.

As John Derbyshire helpfully notes in his history of algebra Unknown Quantity, the history of algebra is extremely dull and uneventful and even depressing for about two thousand years. People are figuring out notation and just about solving quadratics, and that's about it, from Babylon, Egypt, etc, up through the late middle ages. And they just keep doing it over and over again, and not pushing it any further, in part because of the disparate nature of the inquiries. It takes a certain critical mass around the Italian renaissance (Cardano, printing press, competition etc) for the thing to finally, /finally/ start blowing up, later leading to calculus and modern math. Seen this way, the extreme slowness of the early picture is counterposed and even vindicated a bit by the extreme rapidity of the modern period. I'm suggesting in a poetic and unscientific way that the dullness of the earlier part makes the huge payoff of today that much more emotionally gratifying when seen historically.

In this context, shorthands (x) are positive efficiency tools for cognition, which while they were readily assigned to numbers, took a bit longer to be assigned to unknown quantities.

>>8962339
Fuck off back to >>>/his/ where your dumb thread can die

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>>8962339
MD here

>Islam has not ever contributed anything positive to mankind
>Ibn-al Nafis, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Zuhr
>Also preserving the legacy of greeks

>>8962339
>The fact of the matter is that Islam has not ever contributed anything positive to mankind.

The fact that islam is the only modern culture that knows how to treat women (less than cattle, less than shit) is enough for me to say that the muslim world is a modern paradise.

That said, clearly the muslim world has a lot to learn from us. But also, us westerners also have a lot to learn from them.

idk i feel like tolerating some like al-ma'arri in the 10th century was a pretty important philosophical step but hey if you can point to anywhere in christian europe where atheism would have been tolerated

you mean muslims attributing the work of secular byzantine and persians, to islam.