A response to The Crest of the Peacock

The ideas that shocked me throughout the chapter all revolve around colonialism and how it's affected our educational system and history. Throughout the entire chapter I kept saying to myself "I had no idea that happened...that's not what I remember learning", and all of this leads back to how our educational system is extremely Eurocentric and has somewhat altered the past to discredit, or not acknowledge, other great mathematicians.

One of the most interesting pieces of information was about the exchange of knowledge, and how much more was learned from the east than originally given credit for. Asians, Egyptians, Babylonians and Arabs are all some of the people mentioned and credited in this article who helped teach many famous Greek mathematicians and theorists; yet the only ones credited are the Greeks. For example, it mentions that even Pythagoras, famous for the Pythagorean theorem, traveled as far as India to explore and gain knowledge; yet throughout my entire grade school history I never heard of this. I wonder how my views would change had I learnt the importance the east had for influencing western European mathematics.

A second interesting point, that raised many questions, was about the Mayan civilization in Central America. They were able to create a place-value system, but also explore astronomy with limited tools and technology. I would be very interested to learn more about their systems and how they could accomplish such feats 

A final part that made me extremely interested was about the Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which served as almost a campus for intellects to exchange information, learn, and research...oh how it cool it must be to be a fly on the wall in there. To me, the most interesting part was how it brought in people from all over, not just individuals located in Baghdad. The idea of a group of multicultural individuals coming together to share knowledge to progress the art of mathematics was extremely interesting...I don't know why but when I think of older times, I think of less exploration, and more of individuals learning within their home countries. I believe this comes from that Eurocentric ideology where Greek mathematicians are solely credited, and not the others who may have taught them...it makes it seem as if they came up with their theories on their own and had no help.