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At 6:03 AM -0800 12/17/03, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>There is a _reason_ the hard (mathematically based) sciences didn't take
>off in Europe until _after_ Arabic numerals came into widespread use. They
>_couldn't_.
Possible. That may well have been a contributing factor. I doubt it
was the only one. The labor shortage caused by the plague was equally
if not more important in driving technology and science forward. That
this happened around the same time as the adoption of Hindu-Arabic
numerals is suggestive. One wonders if the need for technology (that
did not exist in a society with massive amounts of cheap labor)
helped the import and uptake of Arabic numerals, as it did other
technologies. In other words, were Arabic numerals just one more
technology necessitated by the labor shortage? Would they have been
adopted as quickly if the Black Death hadn't happened? Were they an
effect rather than a cause?
Arabic numerals were known in Spain at least as early as 976 C.E.
Fibonacci and other mathematicians used them in the 1200s. However,
they didn't really replace the Roman system in general usage until
after the Black Death.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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