Re: Other schools of science

[jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx]

I found this interesting list of the top 50 greatest mathematicians of
all time: https://www.sapaviva.com/the-50-greatest-mathematicians/

There's British, French, German mathematicians; there's Ancient Greek, Chinese, and Arab; even a Japanese mathematician.

But not one single American, and not a single Roman from Italy.

Both of those societies, America and Rome, had the most free institutions.
Many of the other societies (like France and Germany and Ancient China) had
absolute monarchies.

Since mathematics is the science most similar to philosophy, this is convincing
proof that liberty has no correlation with philosophy.

-- 
Aaron Lin
jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx
IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

On Sat, Mar 21, 2026 at 10:44:00AM -0700, jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> There was now I remember the Hundred Schools of Thought in China. In the
> Mohism school of philosophy, atoms and elements were also proposed,
> analogous to what Democritus proposed in Greece, at about roughly the
> same era as well (~300BC).
> 
> It's a bit hard to trace their legacy because around 100BC, the Emperor
> of China burned all the competing schools of philosophy besides Legalism
> (the Fa school). It very well may have been these and similar political
> events in history prevented revolutions in science in India and China.
> At a time when China could have entered its own Renaissance, it was
> sacked by the Mongolians.
> 
> I don't know enough about Indian culture, but a quick search on the web shows Indian philosophers also had proto scientific ideas. Since Indian and Chinese cultures both had similar proto-scientific ideas as the Greeks, I highly doubt that the Greeks were unique with their philosophy.
> 
> The main things that made the Greeks much more influential was not
> superiority in their philosophy, but
> 
> 1) The conquest of the known world by Alexander
> 2) The conquest of the known world by the Romans
> 3) The conquest of the known world by the Europeans
> 4) THe conquest of the known world by the Americans
> 
> As we can see, these are due to military warfare rather than any
> inherent superiority in the philosophy.
> 
> As for Alexander, he probably would have been just as brutal as our
> Chinese Qin Shi Huang if he had lived to an old age. Alexander died
> while young, but we see him killing off his friends and forcing his
> subjects to pay him obeisance just like Emperor Qin.
> 
> -- 
> Aaron Lin
> jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx
> IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)
> 
>