Algebra is White

[Karl Lueger]

Algebra

Sir:

In the matter of your short discussion in your page in the matter of the "invention" or "attribution" of mathematics,
"algebra," in this instance, but also geometry and trigonometry, you are absolutely right;
the Arabs did not "invent," numerology and numeric computation.
The Greeks indeed, c.380 BC (your date) or thereabouts
had certainly thought up and thought out the bases of the mathematics which is taught with greater,
but usually lesser, competence in our colleges, universities and "public" schools today.

The name "algebra" is certainly "arab," or "arab-persian," "arab-farsi," etc.
But the matter of this form of mathematics was formed and codified in the peninsulas and archipelagos of the Peloponnese and "Hellas," long, long before the first "Arab" appeared on what was then the edge of the known world.

What happened?
Why does there exist this gross misconception with regard to the real and racial origins of today's advanced mathematics?
Why do so many people, especially, for some reason, public school teachers in the primary grades, attribute to the Arabs the "palm" for "inventing" mathematical computation?
The answer to the first question is simple: historical ignorance.
As well as a nearly innate desire to attribute to anyone whose skin is not White and whose race is not European the "prize" for inventing so much of what makes our world go round. If this trend continues, by mid-century, the negroes of (what is left) of Detroit shall celebrate Martin Luther King as the "inventor" of the motor car, and not Henry Ford.
But, perhaps they do so already.

The answer to the second question may be found in the explication of a "seismic" historical event which occurred in the "Middle East" early in the 5th century, c.620. On this date, the Prophet Mohammed, whose unbalanced "prose," ("Hadith," etc.), was, per the great English historian (and FreeMason) Edward characterized as being "at times lost in the clouds," and " ...at other times crawls in the dust, ..." undertook the "great going forth" from Medina to Mecca, and then, beyond, thereby initiating the phenomenal expansion of the strange new "faith" or heresy of Islam which today may claim more adherents than Christianity.
The "armies" of Islam, actually small bands of fighters, mercenaries, and fanatics, Christian renegades, overran most of what had been, till then, some of the most populous and prosperous provinces of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Which by then was very much on the decline. Starting from Mecca in 620 AD ("Anno Hegira"), the Muslims reached Tangier in present day Morocco by c.640 AD. By 699 AD they had taken Roman Carthage. And the entire North African Shore, the home of St. Augustine, "father" of Latin Catholicism, is in the hands of Islam to this day. As well as almost all of what today is termed the "Middle East."
This momentous development "ruptured" the organic unity of the Mediterranean. And the contacts, especially between the more industrious, urban, populous and wealthy Eastern provinces, and the more backward, latently barbarian Western provinces (modern France, Spain, Portugal, England, etc.), were lost. The "seats" of learning in Antiquity, the universities, the schools of philosophy -- and mathematics, were all in the East: Antioch, Ephesus, and, especially, Alexandria, ("al-Iskandrya"); even Carthage had a not inconsiderable reputation for general learning, and especially rhetoric and the law. Now, all were in the hands of a new, aggressive, and militant culture and society. The culture and society of "Arab" Islam.
It was due to this unforeseen "irruption" of Islam that Western Culture and learning lost contact with and access to the major intellectual and academic "artifacts" of it's culture: philosophy, rhetoric, the law, even prose and poetry -- and mathematics.
But, the Arabs did not, "invent" these things; they captured them, they fell, oh so fortuitously into their hands.
The Arabs played no role in their development and elaboration.
The Arabs, I must repeat did not, "invent" mathematics;
it is entirely a product of Western genius.

And, not only did they capture them, they aggressively and violently denied those whose inheritance they were, from access to their intellectual, cultural and "racial" "property." In the 1920s, a French historian, the late Henri Pirenne, articulated a theory per which he argued that the advent of Islam broke the organic unity of the Mediterranean world; and, made of the Mediterranean an "Islamic Lake." The Arabs, by patrolling this "inland sea" in their galleons, (built on a Roman-Byzantine template), -- and worked and crewed by Christian slaves, cut Western Europe off from the economic "entrepôt" of the southern and eastern "Med." As a consequence, in Western Europe, commerce stagnated; and the complex socio-economic structures of Late Antiquity were replaced by a series of rudimentary, austere, impoverished "institutions" we today refer to as the "feudal system." Economic and social atrophy were "complimented" by a similar (and catastrophic) decline in learning. Europe lost her access to her traditional centers of culture and learning (which had survived the "fall" of Rome), but not the Arab conquest. As a consequence, cultivated society, the "life of the mind," and advanced learning, in the arts and sciences, the practical (or "useful" arts), -- and advanced and practical mathematics, died out in Europe.

The Arab practice of privateering and terrorizing their way around the Western and European shores of "their" sea left a Western European of Southern France and Spain, cut off by hundreds of miles from the arithmetical library at Alexandria. Thus, he had precious little opportunity to become even modestly well-versed in mathematics if a troop of pathological mass murderers, swinging crescent shaped scimitars, continually made land fall near his village to carry his family and neighbours off to the slave marts of Algiers or Tunis.
Further from this, we must resist the (erroneous) temptation to "congratulate" the Arabs for "keeping safe" this priceless legacy of Western thought during those long centuries when the Western World was too backward and barbarous to appreciate properly this legacy. In fact, when the Arabs did take Alexandria, apparently with the help of treasonous elements amongst the resident jewish population, the first thing they did with the fabled "library at Alexandria" was to burn it down!! Several centuries later, c.1120 AD, a Western traveller, perhaps Genoese or Veronese, in Alexandria "on business," visited the ruin of the old library and saw there the niches in the walls, where the "priceless" scrolls were kept; the walls were still scorched with the marks of the fire which had burnt these "priceless" scrolls to a crisp.

One must also bear in mind something very important about the Arabs -- the Arabs are not, emphatically not, inventors.
They are imitators -- like the Asians in our own day. But they are not inventors, they are not innovators. In fact, the "derivative" nature of every facet of Arab/Muslim "civilization" may be noted in the fact that, of all the vast territory which the Arabs (and their surrogates), "conquered," from the Pillars of Hercules to the West to the sun-baked plains of Central India to the East, the Arabs, across the whole of that vast territory only founded one new city. Of all the cities we currently equate with a preponderant "Muslim" "identity" : Tunis, Algiers, Tangier, Istanbul, Damascus, Baghdad, etc., none are "Arab" cities. Before the advent of Islam these cities, were Roman, Greek, Persian, Indian, but not "Arab."

The same is true of language, education and religion.
The Islamic "religion" is simply, at it's essence, an extremely simplified form of Christianity. Mohammed, a trader and a rover by profession, had only ever experienced two streams of religious thought: the myths and terrors of his people's animist beliefs in the Arabian "boot," and the "high religion" of cultivated westerners whom he met in the bazaars of Damascus, Jerusalem and Constantinople. The same is true of language. One might say, truthfully, that there is "no such thing" as "Arabic." Each distinct region of the Arab world speaks it's own version of "Arabic." In North Africa, much of the population speaks Algerian "jihaba," a dialectical "patois," incorporating a mixture of "arabic," with a substrate of Berber and some "lost" Latin and Greek words. Look at a map of North Africa, and the Middle East, note place names which incorporate the word "Ksur," or "Qsur," in the full title. Those places are, or were, before the disaster of 620 AD and after, "Roman" fortresses or fortified cities; "Ksur" is a corruption of the Latin "castro," meaning "camp," (not castle), or "strong place."

And the same is true of mathematics.
Mathematics is not an Arab invention.
The Arabs took over the centers of learning of the Eastern Mediterranean. Western Europeans were denied access to and exercise of their patrimony. In fact, there are historians who state that the Arabs played almost no role in the preservation of this unique intellectual legacy of Western thought. The Arab economy was then (it still is today to a degree), founded upon chattel slavery. And some historians thoughtfully, and forcefully, declare that it was the thousands of well educated, intelligent Greek slaves and indentured servants in Arab territory captured from the West who were really responsible for preserving and "handing down" the Western heritage of mathematical computation during those dark centuries when the arms of Islam controlled the Mediterranean; and Western Europeans remained "buttoned up" in dark and damp castle keeps, surviving on the threadbare socio-economic "protocols" of the feudal system, waiting for St. Benedict to waken them from their barbaric slumber and send them off on Crusade. Which effort wrested the holy places of Western Christendom from their Arab interlopers, and bore home, amongst the silks and fabrics, Egyptian tangerines and "Damascened" silver, the priceless works of literature, poetry, rhetoric, law, and -- the mathematical sciences. It was only with the advent of the Crusades that our heritage and patrimony, the priceless legacy of Western Man, saw its redemption and was brought home, after a lapse of many centuries to its rightful heirs. Now, written in a foreign language, the original Greek and Latin copies long gone, were consigned to oblivion. These works were probably labouriously copied out by a Greek slave of Antioch or Edessa, in Arabic calligraphic, to assist the instruction of his master's sons. And for the illumination of his own posterity.
The Arabs did not "invent" mathematics or algebra or trigonometry.
Anyone who says that they did is a fool and a liar.

Sincerely Yours,
J.L F. 28 May 2001

[Karl Lueger]

some White heirs who followed:

William James Sidis
(April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944)

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities.
He had an IQ of 250-300 and could read before he was 2.
Born in 1898, Sidis spoke a handful of languages,
was a mathematical genius and started Harvard at 11, becoming a professor before he was 20.
He died in 1944, at the young age of 46.
He may have been the smartest man on the planet.

Pythagoras
(570 BC - 495 BC)

Pythagoras was an Ionian Greek philosopher who made important developments in mathematics, astronomy and the theory of music. He was the founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of our information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, thus very little reliable information is known about him. He was born on the island of Samos, and may have traveled widely in his youth, visiting Egypt and other places seeking knowledge. Around 530 BC, he moved to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy and there set up a religious sect. His followers pursued the religious rites and practices developed by Pythagoras and studied his philosophical theories. The society took an active role in the politics of Croton, but this eventually led to their downfall. The Pythagorean meeting-places were burned and Pythagoras was forced to flee the city. He is said to have ended his days in Metapontum.

Blaise Pascal
(June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662)

Blaise Pascal only lived to be 39 years old but the 17th-century Frenchman really packed it into those four decades, getting an early start when he began doing complex geometric proofs at age 12.

By 16, he had his own theorem and was hanging out with prominent French mathematicians. He even invented an early mechanical calculator, called the Pascaline, at the age of 19.

By the time of his death, Pascal had moved beyond mathematics to become a philosopher, theologian and writer.
Today, he's known as much for being an expert in those fields as he is for being a mathematician.

Nicolaus Copernicus
(February 19, 1473 - May 24, 1543)

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Prussian astronomer and the first to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published just before his death in 1543, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution.

Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, quadrilingual polyglot, classical scholar, translator, artist, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist. Among his many responsibilities, astronomy figured as little more than an avocation - yet it was in that field that he made his mark upon the world.

Michael Minovitch
The Invention of Minovitch’s theory of Gravity Propelled Interplanetary Space Travel was so radical it did not require any rocket fuel or any on-board energy generating system, but was capable of generating vehicle velocities far greater than the most advanced nuclear propulsion system, and was independent of the vehicle’s mass. Moreover, it was not even based on Newton’s Third Law of Motion. When Minovitch presented it to JPL in the form of 47 page technical paper dated August 23, 1961, it was dismissed by the head of JPL’s Trajectory Group as impossible.
Minovitch invented his theory by using his fields of expertise which were advanced mathematics and advanced physics and not using anything from the classical theory of reaction propulsion. It was such a radical departure from the classical theory of space travel that it didn’t even use any of the most basic operating principles in the classical theory.
http://www.gravityassist.com/

Milutin Milanković (Dalj 28 May 1879 – Belgrade 12 December 1958), was a Serbian geophysicist and civil engineer, best known for his theory of ice ages, suggesting a relationship between Earth's long-term climate changes and periodic changes in its orbit, now known as Milankovitch cycles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milutin_Milankovi%C4%87

Leonhard Euler
(April 15, 1707 - September 18, 1783)

Leonhard Euler was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.

Euler spent most of his adult life in St. Petersburg, Russia and in Berlin, Prussia. He is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century and arguably the greatest of all time. He is also one of the most prolific; his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes. A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is our teacher in all things," which has also been translated as "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all.

Évariste Galois (French pronunciation: [evaʁist ɡalwa]) (October 25, 1811 – May 31, 1832) was a French mathematician born in Bourg-la-Reine. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a long-standing problem. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory, a major branch of abstract algebra, and the subfield of Galois connections. He was the first to use the word "group" (French: groupe) as a technical term in mathematics to represent a group of permutations. A radical Republican during the monarchy of Louis Philippe in France, he died from wounds suffered in a duel under shadowy circumstances at the age of twenty.

[Dan_O]

the negroes of (what is left) of Detroit shall celebrate Martin Luther King as the "inventor" of the motor car, and not Henry Ford.
But, perhaps they do so already.

I stopped reading here. Ford didn't invent the car, why should I believe the rest of the article?

[Rehmat]

Algebra is NOT White but ARAB. Its inventor was an Muslim Arab mathematician by the name Sheikh al-Jabber.

http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/02...o-in-damascus/