The Crest of the Peacock reading notes

One thing I was surprised by in this reading was the quote suggesting that math simply lay dormant after the decline of Greek civilization until the Europeans were able to revitalize it. I knew the tendency of Eurocentric writers to attribute significant responsibility for mathematical development to the early Greeks and later Europeans alone. However, the rather blatant and outright ridiculous suggestion that other areas on the globe simply did not engage in math or develop it when the Greek's were unable was quite shocking from a fairly contemporary writer. 

Such claims are additionally ironic when considering the Greeks themselves seemed happy to acknowledge the role of other areas' scholars in teaching them or contributing to their work. In particular, I was surprised to learn how some scholars from Plato's academy found refuge in Jund-i-Shapur (in modern day Iran) to continue their study of astronomy and mathematics and that Pythagoras may have also ventured as far as India in his own search for knowledge. Both examples seem to speak to the idea that the actual Greek scholars of the time were more than open to knowledge from these other sources and thus likely would have attributed any findings to the places where they gathered it. 

One other point that surprised me and that I found insightful was on the flow of Chinese inventions toward Europe. While I was already aware of some of the specific inventions, such as paper, the compass, or the segmental arch-bridge, I had not previously thought about it in the context of the flow of math knowledge as well. In particular, the idea that certain mathematical ideas would likely have been transferred with this technology because of its role in inventing them, thereby highlighting this direction of knowledge transfer into Europe from outside, was new and interesting to me.