糖心TV

It's rare that we stop to think about our "history" intentionally — we're mathematicians, not historians. But the history of our field is a narrative that helps us make sense of key discoveries and contributions. Whether explicitly or implicitly, most of us would tell the story of mathematical history as follows: the ancient Greeks laid some incredible foundations (with names like Pythagoras, Euclid, and Archimedes); and these foundations were then taken and formed, from the 11th century onwards, by people like Fibonacci, Newton and Gauss, into the field of mathematics as we know it today. But there are clues hidden in plain sight that tell us some crucial names and cultures are missing. The Arabic origins of the words algebra, algorithm and sine; and the fact that the numbers we use (1,2,...,9) are the Indo-Arabic numeral system. These contributions are rarely named, in the way that the contributions of European cultures are. But when we do name them, we start to see hints that the conventional narrative I just told leaves some major gaps.