Re: Why Python When There Is Perl?

On 3/25/2024 7:09 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:

On 3/25/2024 6:41 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:

On 3/24/2024 10:59 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:41:23 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:
>

Huh... This is a good point. I had never thought of that... Alexander
did get pretty close to India! In fact he occupied the northern part of
India which has recently become Pakestan.

>
Don't forget that Alexander was a late comer. Persia owned Afghanistan,
Pakistan. and a chunk of India when it invade Greece in 492 BCE. Cyrus had
already eaten Ionia and the rest of the Greek settlements on that side of
the pond.
>
Was there an exchange of ideas and which way did it flow? Who knows.
People get around. There's a lot of legend involved but Bodhidharma is
supposed to have started Chan Buddhism in China. In the art work he isn't
depicted as Chinese and in the legends he is either from Persia, India, or
some other vague place far away to the west. Wherever, he had a lot of
miles on his sandals.

>
>
Yes it may have well been 300 years before Alexander. The present West Turkey was historically part of Greece, and the entire Asia Minor was under the control of Cyrus on the west side, and his empire had a very long border with India. So it is possible that the source was only Greece, and it was from there that it travelled east all the way to India.
>
Still, I have doubts. The oldest Indian books have plenty of math in them. Somebody with math background and excellent knowledge of old Indian languages, and several other ones, including middle and old Persian (Pahlavi and Avestan) and Arabic, should take a very close look at it to see if this math prowess in there dates from anywhere before the time of Cyrus or came later. I'm not sure how authentic Indian sources are also, as far as the date of their appearance is concerned.
>
Also, when we say "Greece", should the mind go there, where Greece now is?  Many of the math and science developers were living in Egypt and may have been ethnic Egyptians who spoke and wrote in Greek, and who had a civilization of their own which dealt much with Math (Pyramids, and a vast number of other needed calculations pertaining management of huge amounts of agricultural products). Nile was there in Egypt, creating all such products and the need to deal with.
>
And soon after Cyrus, Darius ruled over Egypt as well and even occupied part of today's Greece also. So I still have doubts about Greece.
>
A physicist, when several factors like that pop up in front of him, takes a step back and looks at the whole picture.
>
The whole picture is, math was developed where it was _badly_needed_. The intense need was the result of agricultural products attaining vast quantities. Vast quantities, required agriculturally rich lands, which are always around large rivers for reasons of water and the quality of soil.
>
Now, India had its mighty Ganges. Iran on northeast had her Amu Darya and Syr Darya, and on her southwest had the Tigris and Euphrates. And Egypt had her mighty Nile, the longest river in the world.
>
What did Greece have?... Did they sit and play with their balls and this led them to take the next step and devise Euclidean Geometry? Do you see the picture? Written history aside (which is always full of partiality and bullshit), the need for math must've arisen elsewhere, either in Egypt, or in Iran, or in India.
>
That's my best guess.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

 Prediction and knowing of the time of the year also played a role in developing math, and was the result of agricultural needs. Plus, managing anything that had to do with multitude of men required math. Men began to be around themselves in great numbers when cities were first created, again as a result of development of agriculture.
 And as soon as some useful method would be developed, it would travel fast to wherever else it was badly needed. The source could be the Greeks, but the ones who were in Egypt as ethnic Greeks.
 

But agriculture, as creator of math, is at the least 7 thousand years old!...
The best knowledge of the day when I looked into it last, was that it began 11000 years back in the area north of today's Afghanestan, which places it in between Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the area historically called "Kharazm." So the invention began there, but it had to get widespread enough to lead to math development, and that was a few thousand years after that.
So the advent of math still falls thousands of years before we know anything about history. And back then, who knows who was living where?
Today's geographical spread of language comes to help a bit. Anything non-Semitic that we speak today in, has come from India, from Sanskrit. The mother of it all. Hindu, Iranian, Greek, Russian, German, English, Latin, French they all originated from India. I still see words in Sanskrit that I can understand by my Persian knowledge! Same in German and English, etc.
So I'd say, from the main choices to make, I'll pick India for area in which math was developed first, thousands of years before Cyrus, then the knowledge travelled to other areas also having agricultural activities of their own. And Greeks perhaps received the seeds of it in Egypt where there was an intense use for it, then the affluent ones developed it to amazingly advanced levels.
That method of raising to large integer powers that I made a baby problem with, was being used in Egypt 5 thousand years back! They needed to have a way to multiply something many times over, and found a way to do it with minimum multiplications. For 100 as the power, only 8 multiplications.
Now whether Egyptians created it themselves, or they learned it from southwest Iranians who had probably in turn learned it from Indians,... who knows.
Another thing is that Indians have many different ways of calculating. Kharazmi, when studied them, only adopted one form of them. We more or less use the same algorithm for multiplication, while Indians have like 30 different other ways for multiplication. This also kind of points to where it was first originated.
I'm sure you've glanced over Ramanujan's personal notes. It is a three volume book. And a lot of such math notes are mystery for non-Indians.
Some of it was fully understood by mathematicians in Europe and they published them as well, especially the ones that could be proven in the ways modern mathematics deploys. But as far as I know, the work of fully deciphering his notes never finished. He had other ways of proving stuff, other forms of tables and resources, other compilations of useful facts that he always used for finding new stuff in math and proving them.
In his notes, he had proven problems that in modern math was considered unsolvable, using some other Indian math techniques that they had at their disposal.
So these all points to India as the origin, the mother of it all, just like the language we speak. The role that Greece in between all this had, if you ask me, should tie with the Greeks in Egypt where math was "badly needed."
--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
www.avast.com