Response to the Crest of the Peacock

After reading The Crest of the Peacock by George Gheverghese Joseph, there were quite a few things that surprised me. The first thing that caught me off guard is how Eurocentric the common history of mathematics. I’d always assumed that math had started primarily in ancient Greece and then moved to modern Europe. But the reading contradicted this view by showing that Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and many other peoples had also made important contributions. This perspective led me to question why the history I studied focused predominantly on one part of the globe.

I was also shocked to see that the amount of mathematical knowledge common to the cultures. I used to think that civilizations invented math more or less independently, but this text is describing a network of interaction, not a single path. This helped me see mathematics as knowledge that arose from interactions between different societies.

At last I was struck by the importance of Indian mathematics. This discussion is about the transmission of Indian mathematics to other areas and its transformations. I knew India had helped mathematics, but I did not know how much. It got me to thinking about how many significant contributions might be missed if we only study one aspect of mathematical history.