Re: Happy Birthday Jp

Both Mathematics and Alchemy were Arabic concepts I think (or maybe even
further East). And they probably had them well before the beginning of
Islam.

I've just been wondering when it was that we adopted Arabic numerals.
There are a lot of early Iredale wills from the Loweswater area in the
17th century and it's quite usual for them to use Roman numerals.
The will of Cicelie Iredale who died in 1645 has Roman numerals in the
inventory but Arabic on the administration papers. It seems that
ordinary folk were still comfortable with Roman while the authorities
had changed.

I'd go through some more wills but when I transcribed them I often
altered Roman to Arabic (a bad mark for me) so to find out I'd have to
go through the originals and that's much more work.

Very interesting. Thanks.

Edgar

The Arabs gave us zero. Now wasn't that nice. I can't imagine how we'd
have progressed towards the Information Revolution without it.
Jp

The thing about the Arabs and Moslims/Islamics was they were like sponges
when it came to knowledge. I can't say they were great innovators
themselves but they soaked up all the knowledge of the ancients no matter
where they found it, wrote it all down in books and applied it to things
like achitecture and farming etc. They did a great service to humanity by
being avid librarians for 700 years keeping the knowledge available whist
the christians and others destroyed civilisation right up until the end of
the dark ages.

Salisbury Cathedral has roof timbers with arabic numbers on them dating
back to the 1100's. The significance of them was only recently realised.
They now think this was borrowed from the Moors who were the greatest
architechs of that periods. So christian tradesmen may have been the first
to find them useful.

Johnny-more-on-Moors
.

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