Comment by pqtyw
6 days ago
Things like:
"" Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1) "" or: "" It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2) ""
Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.
It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
It's significant because we already have patterns of thought where we credit civilization and such to white people and it causes problems.
You might not realize it, but thousands of these tiny things over a lifetime creates a subconscious bias. And then that manifests in real ways. Like, for example, disregarding or discrediting an area of study you know nothing about based purely on the type of people who created the study.
I agree - trying to show that other people may have discovered things that we believe we did exclusively is abhorrent and those people deserve all the sanctions that we can impose on them.
Where are those quotes from?
This appears to be the source: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/school-of-mathematics/about-us/eq...