I Am Not a Wise Man
I cannot tell you the secrets of the Universe. I don't know who or what God is, or even if there is such a deity.
All I know is that the careless and short-sighted actions of fervent religious followers set the course of modern mathematics back by over 2000 years.
Prayers, people. We lost the fundamental tenants of calculus for millennia because someone wanted to elaborate on chanting to an invisible bearded man who lives in the clouds.
1 comment:
In all honesty, I don't think you can really blame the monk for this one. The book wasn't being used by contemporary mathematicians; it was sitting on a shelf somewhere being ignored because no one else understood what the hell those little marks meant. The work was too advanced for its own good. Probably, the monk in question grabbed this book from a stack of books which were going to be recycled in the same way.
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