discovery of zero
Reader comment on item: Dinesh D'Souza Walks on the Dark Side

Submitted by john h. rubel (United States), Mar 16, 2007 at 19:02

The Arabs did NOT discover zero. It appears in the literature of ancient Babylon. Unless you want to believe the Babylonians WERE Arabs. In any case, zero is NOT a peculiarly Islamic contribution to mathematics. Maybe it would be well to let the matter rest. A small and self-satisfying lie may be a small price to pay for inflating Arab/Islamic pride, given the paucity of almost anything else of note for this multiplying society to cling to, one that never produced a Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Pasteur, Planck, Freud, Einstein, Schroedinger, Gell-Mann, Feynman and dozens more.

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