Religious Influence on the Spread of Mathematics
An Academic response to The Music of the Spheres Some may find it hard to believe that the greatest of all historical mathematicians were influenced by their own spiritual and religious beliefs, and indeed, without religion, one could argue that we would not have advanced to the mathematics we have today. Surely, humanity would have eventually arrived to the same fundamental understands of numbers and geometry, but one has to doubt if the founding figures of math would have had the same curiosity if it wasn’t for religious influencing their desire to understand the world. Regardless of such speculation, it is known that mathematics would not have been able to spread throughout the world if …show more content…
Using his continuing understanding of the world around him, he was able to create music by breaking up a vibrating string and create cords. Bronoweski states that “to the Pythagoreans that discovery had a mystic force” (156). It is important to understand the “mystic force” as the spiritual understanding of the world around him. The religious and spiritual influence on Pythagoras’s work is evident when Bronoweski states that when the mathematician proved his theory, he sacrifices one hundred oxen to the muses in gratitude for their divine inspiration (“The …show more content…
Muslim mathematicians created devices like the astrolabe and the astronomical computer that allowed others to better worship Allah by showing practitioners when to pray, when their holy days were, and for those on pilgrimage, the way to Mecca. Regardless of the religious implications, the astrolabe and the astronomical computer gave the practitioner, on a basic level, the ability to perform basic math functions. These calculators gave rise to the love of calculations, especially for the Moorish scholars (“The Music”). The love of calculations gave rise to the most important single invention by Arab scholars—the Arabic alphabet and the writing of numbers. These numbers, still used today, gave a much needed improvement over the old Greek style of number addition. This is incredibly important because the Islamic religion had spread to Western Europe, and, even after Christianity took back the Islamic regions, western scholars were drinking from the same mathematical water of Pythagoras carried by the Islamic vessels (“The Music”). Today, we owe our mathematics, algebra, alphabet, almanac, and various forms of math and astronomy to the spiritual wonderings of Pythagoras and the spread of Islam throughout the world. Religion has given us, modern students of mathematics, the opportunity to study the same theorems as Pythagoras, Euclid, and other Islamic
An Academic response to The Music of the Spheres Some may find it hard to believe that the greatest of all historical mathematicians were influenced by their own spiritual and religious beliefs, and indeed, without religion, one could argue that we would not have advanced to the mathematics we have today. Surely, humanity would have eventually arrived to the same fundamental understands of numbers and geometry, but one has to doubt if the founding figures of math would have had the same curiosity if it wasn’t for religious influencing their desire to understand the world. Regardless of such speculation, it is known that mathematics would not have been able to spread throughout the world if …show more content…
Using his continuing understanding of the world around him, he was able to create music by breaking up a vibrating string and create cords. Bronoweski states that “to the Pythagoreans that discovery had a mystic force” (156). It is important to understand the “mystic force” as the spiritual understanding of the world around him. The religious and spiritual influence on Pythagoras’s work is evident when Bronoweski states that when the mathematician proved his theory, he sacrifices one hundred oxen to the muses in gratitude for their divine inspiration (“The …show more content…
Muslim mathematicians created devices like the astrolabe and the astronomical computer that allowed others to better worship Allah by showing practitioners when to pray, when their holy days were, and for those on pilgrimage, the way to Mecca. Regardless of the religious implications, the astrolabe and the astronomical computer gave the practitioner, on a basic level, the ability to perform basic math functions. These calculators gave rise to the love of calculations, especially for the Moorish scholars (“The Music”). The love of calculations gave rise to the most important single invention by Arab scholars—the Arabic alphabet and the writing of numbers. These numbers, still used today, gave a much needed improvement over the old Greek style of number addition. This is incredibly important because the Islamic religion had spread to Western Europe, and, even after Christianity took back the Islamic regions, western scholars were drinking from the same mathematical water of Pythagoras carried by the Islamic vessels (“The Music”). Today, we owe our mathematics, algebra, alphabet, almanac, and various forms of math and astronomy to the spiritual wonderings of Pythagoras and the spread of Islam throughout the world. Religion has given us, modern students of mathematics, the opportunity to study the same theorems as Pythagoras, Euclid, and other Islamic