"All the algorithms for fractions now used were invented by the Hindus. The Greek treatment of fractions never advanced beyond the level of the Egyptian Rhind papyrus. […] This inability to treat a fraction as a number on its own merits is the explanation of a practice [which] was as useless as it was ambiguous. […] When we remember that the Greeks and Alexandrians continued this extraordinary performance, there is nothing remarkable about the small progress which they achieved in their arithmetic. What is remarkable is that a few of them like Archimedes should have discovered anything at all about series of numbers involving fractional quantities."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Lancelot Hogben, Hogben, Lancelot. Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self Educator. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1937. in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lancelot_Hogben
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Lancelot Hogben
Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician.
6 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Lancelot Hogben →
Related Quotes
"This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democrac…"
"‘The change did not come about without obstruction from the representatives of custom thought. An edict of A.D. 1259 …"
"The difficulty of understanding why it should have been the Hindus who took this step, why it was not taken by the ma…"
"In the whole history of Mathematics, there has been no more revolutionary step than the one which the Indian made whe…"
"Άγιος που δε θαυματουργεί, μηδέ δοξολογιέται."
"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"
"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"
"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"
"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens…"
"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse…"