Status Updates From A Short Account of the Hist...

Tried to listen on 2x while jogging (started C25K from beginning, last time jogged maybe in Sept) under heavy rain. 2x is too fast and Paul King's voice is mind-numbing.

Pythagoras seemed to be a cult leader. It's interesting to look at Pythagoras through a lens of modern cults e.g. Bay Area rats :).

I'll try to persevere with listening, but this book should probably be read, as it's dense and has maths.

The last part of chapter 1 on Chinese mathematics is disappointing. I'd recommend just looking it up on Wikipedia. Also I forgot to mention that Ball kinda implies that a lot of cultures (e.g. Phoenicians) didn't generalize maths (e.g. algebra) because they used abacus, which allowed traders to do + - × ÷ without any theoretical knowledge of maths.

Egyptians cared about temple positioning this about North & South. Practical way to generate a right angle? Use 3 ropes sizes 3 4 5! Rhind papyrus has a good approximation of pi. Since Rhind Egyptians didn't progress in geometry (Rhind itself most likely collection of older empirical results, not a research work), only Greeks later developed it by applying deduction.

Greeks definitely borrowed geometry from Egypt. Greeks despised practice: measuring Earth (definition of geometry) would not yield truth but approximations. Egyptians however had to measure Earth due to Nile. Jews and Phoenicians sucked at geometry: Old Testament contains geometric errors, e.g. pi = 3.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhind... had multiple arithmetic results with little info on how they were gotten. Egyptians (as Greeks too) struggled with fractions, a large chunk of Rhind is decomposition of unit fractions into sums of unit fractions. It does however have proto-algebra in the form of unknown being denoted by a heap symbol and symbols for + - =.

If you listen closely you can here Paul King inhaling like Vader. Ball divides history of maths into Greek, Renaissance, Modern, with Egypt and Phoenicia being prehistory. Laŭ Ball we know little of Phoenician maths, but they were prolific traders. If Greeks took alphabet from them, they probably took some maths too.

Just read the preface and started ch1. It's maybe my 3rd attempt at this book. Paul King's narration a bit monotonous, though audible. The edition # isn't mentioned (I think), but the year is 1893 (2nd edition?). That's when Peano/Frege were still working on their stuff, so this Rouse Ball was probably unaware of such work. Most interesting maths was in 20th century. We'll see.