The first thing that stood out to me is "history is written by the winners". What this means is history was written by winners of wars and conflicts. You can see that our current mandatory education system was established around 18th and 19th centuries and this was brought about by the industrial revolution in the western world. So textbooks were mainly written by Europeans. Therefore, you see that the material were very eurocentric. I wonder what would have happened if textbooks were written maybe 1000 or even 2000 years ago? Would we see more contributions from the rest of the world like Arabs, Indians and Chinese?
I was also mesmerized by figure 1.4. It is a very interesting map which shows the development and transmission of mathematics around the world. Interactions among the different civilizations like wars, pilgrimages and trades helped the transmissions. Before I read this article, I knew there were inter-civilizations interactions but I never knew that it was this extensive as shown in figure 1.4.
Another thought I had after reading the article was that concepts like Pythagorean theorem, algebra, equations solving are so common place in today's schools. However, these were discoveries made by our forefathers, after putting countless hours or even their whole lives into them. Reading histories of mathematics helps us appreciate more what people thousands years ago did for us (does not matter what civilization they were from) and that we do not take these for granted.
Great, thoughtful reflections, Ivan -- thank you!
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