/sci/ - Science & Math

I copy and pasted this from wikipedia's Timeline of Mathematics page. I stopped at von Neumann because I have no clue how to rank 20th century mathematicians- too many tragically misunderstood algebra geniuses to sort through.

I didn't include the contributions per person, but you can look them up easily. Looking at mathematics from the timeline view, it becomes very obvious that mathematical progress depends almost entirely on whether or not what is already known is copied down and then distributed throughout the population, kept there, and then repeated over and over again until someone "gets it."

I mean, you just don't see geniuses where there aren't texts to read and copy from, and more surprisingly, you really don't see "lone geniuses" until the texts have been circulated for a couple hundred years at least... which doesn't make for a very convincing argument that humans are very intelligent. It seems like the bulk of mathematical scholarship throughout history isn't advancing mathematics but preserving what is already known by copying and storing it. Lots and lots of copying.

Rarely do you see a region exposed to an ancient text and within two generations a Leibniz pops up. It just doesn't happen. You only see Lebiniz's after dozens of generations of laborious, rote education. I doubt France, for example, would have had made any progress mathematically if it weren't for the Italians translating, printing, and distributing the works of Archimedes and Euclid during the Renaissance, who themselves would not have experienced any progress if they didn't have the texts or did so much trading (also sprsly impt).

It also surprised me how many "advanced" ideas were known for thousands of years, but only until notation systems were standardized are the mathematicians considered to have "understood" the idea officially, the main ideas of calculus being an obvious example. It's kind of embarrassing, as in, "It took us that long to figure out how to do that? Really?"