West, Meet East

Back then, when I was younger, I thought heard my history teacher wrong about an Arab being the founder/father of Algebra. I thought that something very critical a subject like that can’t originate here in our continent. Man, I was stupid for not believing the capacities of Asians.

The second installment of The Story of Maths: Genius of the East, left me with pure respect for Asians, when the glory of Mathematics have rusted in Greece the great, it shone most on the land of the Mongoloid and Caucasoid races. However, it took more effort to realize the impressive influence of the East to the development of Mathematics. 

In this second episode, Marcus du Sautoy, traveled to China where he explores the many uses of mathematics and the further discoveries of Chinese about it. One thing that fascinated me, and I think everyone else was too, is the use of patterns for the emperor to sleep with his entire imperial harem! (How, polygamous is that?!)

He also found out about their mystical beliefs on the power of numbers and their fascination with numbers that he introduced (probably) the first way numbers were used for leisure: an ancient version of Sudoku!

Then he moves to India where zero was finally invented! The symbol came up because of the empty circular space being left by the once assigned stone. Gwalior Fort has inscriptions of zero on its walls.  The concept of infinity and negative numbers were also introduced by the Indians and its ultimatum to the invention of trigonometry. This makes them giants in the field of mathematics because of their ingenious ideas that are extremely relevant in our society today.

Next comes in the Arabs of the Middle East where a new language of Algebra has developed as I have mentioned earlier. The episode wrap up with the Western mathematician like Leonardo Fibonacci and his famous sequence which was named after him.

The movie was again, interesting for me because it dwells yet in the history of math, much more than the first movie because this is much closer to my heart since I’m an Asian.

In this episode, we see again how mathematics has helped ancient civilizations with their sociological problems and how the East has met West in greater understanding of numbers. And it made me proud to be an Asian, needless to say.