African Diaspora within the Mathematical Sciences February 17, 2011 at 1:50pm In Mathematics, more than any other field of study, have we heard proclamations and statements similar to, The Negro is incapable of succeeding. Ancient and present achievements contradict such statements. One of the purposes of this website is to exhibit the inaccuracy of those proclamations by exhibiting the accomplishments of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora within the Mathematical SciencesPurely Eurocentric origins of mathematics can no longer be upheld. The oldest (35,000 BC) mathematical object was found in Swaziland. The oldest example of arithmetic (6000 BC) was found in Zaire.The 4000 year old, so-called Moscow papyrus, contains geometry, from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, the consequence of the formula for the volume of a truncated square pyramid. From Herodotus (~450 BC) to Proclus (~400 BC) to Aristotle (~350 BC), Egypt was the cradle of mathematics (astronomy and surveying too). From the earliest, the great Greek mathematicians, including Pythagoras (~500 BC), Thales (~530 BC), and Exodus (the teacher of Aristotle) all learned much of their mathematics from Egypt (Mesopotamia, and possibily India) - even the concept of zero. It is true that a zero placeholder was not used (or needed) in the Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic numerals because these numerals did not have positional value. But the zero concept has many other applications. Generalizations about the area of a circle or the volume of a truncated square pyramid are most evident in Egyptian mathematics. Checking the correctness of a division by a subsequent multiplication or verifying the solutions of different types of equation by the method of substitution are found from a time before the Greeks existed. A method, in common use in Europe until the 19th century, for solving linear equations is generally known as the method of false position. This method was in common use to solve practical practical problems such as finding the potency of beer or optimal feed mixtures for cattle and poultry in Egyptian mathematics. A century before U.S. slavery was ended, slaves and even ordinary African slave traders demonstrated mathematical abilities more sophisticated than the European buyers. Some 250 years prior to Newton and Liebnitz, a 15th century Indian mathematician, Madhava of Kerala, derived infinite series forand for some trigonometric functions. Here we limit to Africa our discussions of ancient mathematics, and will not discuss the extremely significant results due to Indian, Chinese, Babylonian, South American and other non-European groups
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 03:23:00 +0000
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