[Artemisia] The Fossil State In Persona

[Sarah Natividad]

Amen, Therasia, about the interplay between language and culture.

I'd like to add that there's a distinct interplay between mathematics and
technology too.  The Maya had a fabulous base-20 numeration system, with a
zero even, but they never developed past the arithmetic they needed to plan
their calendars because in one of the places the base was 18.  Even if you
have the symbols, it's hard to do symbolic calculation if your base changes
in the middle of it.  Full-powered symbolic calculation, brought to Europe
with the Hindu-Arabic numerals, powered the banking industry, drove the
Renaissance, and generally made possible the technological development that
Yumitori notes.

On the other side of that, while we like to say that math is "discovered" as
if it were pre-existing terra incognita, it's actually more like invented,
and the people who do the inventing are steeped in and limited by their
culture and language.  People tend to invent things they see a use for, but
only if they are not totally preoccupied by providing for their day-to-day
existence.  The degree of prosperity that we have now (thanks to our
technology) enables us to come up with all sorts of uselessly wild
mathematical notions like string theory and incompleteness theorems.  Thus
it was only when technology (and its attendant prosperity) advanced to the
point where people could spend time calculating astronomical tables that
Napier came up with his logarithms; Cardano couldn't have afforded to solve
cubic equations if he were a subsistence farmer.

So developments in technology give people the free time to develop
mathematics, while developments in mathematics make developments in
technology possible.

Obrigada,
Lianor

-- 
Sarah Natividad
http://www.curious-workmanship.com
http://organicbabyfarm.blogspot.com