Crest of the Peacock Intro Response

While I read this, I was surprised by the amount of travel and sharing of mathematical knowledge that was happening in the ancient world. I was not surprised that many different cultures were doing different types of math all over, but I had thought of it more as different cultures discovering the principals of mathematics in different ways. If I had had to guess before reading this, I would have said that many people would have discovered mathematical principals independently and that they likely would all have different names for them and different ways of proving things. I underestimated how much knowledge would travel with trade and with the fluctuations and changes in empires and also how much knowledge would travel by people specifically traveling to centers of learning and sharing what they knew.

Another thing I had not considered before this is the idea of looking at where modern notation and number systems and words for terms come from. I had thought (briefly) about where mathematical concepts came from but not about where the tools, we use to communicate these concepts come from. It was interesting learning about where different words for concepts originated. 

The last thing that surprised me was that the Pythagorean theorem had been stated in many different ways all over the world. The idea of different concepts being found in different ways around the world is not necessarily surprising to me. However, I find it surprising in the case of the Pythagorean theorem for two reasons. The first is that I associate the Pythagorean theorem so strongly with the modern way that it is presented. I think that this is because it is an idea that you learn when you are relatively young and then use a lot, so I have a hard time thinking of this theorem being stated in any way other than the way I learnt it. The other reason I find it surprising is that I knew before reading this that Pythagoras was Greek, so I think of it as a Greek theorem. I normally don’t know much, if anything, about the people our theorems are named after so, given that Pythagoras being Greek was one of the few facts I knew about someone who had a theorem name after them I found it memorable. It made me think of the Pythagorean theorem as a distinctly Greek theorem.