Three things that surprised me about "Crest of the Peacock"
2. How global the contributions to Math is.
I think I had the bias that contributions to math was mostly a "white/European" endeavor and I'm not sure as to the exact reason why. I think for one, I heard lots of European names around math. If you think about the BC math contest names, its Pascal, Cayley, and Fermat. Calculus is credited to Newton and Leibniz. However, they were just building on the math that was thought about from across the world. I do genuinely believe that no matter where you come from, you are capable of doing anything anyone else can, but I just never thought about this inherent bias, which surprised me. I also did not know about the Egyptian and Indian contributions, and how instrumental Arabic culture around Math helped shape the math we have today.
1. That the Babylonians were solving cubic equations
I was surprised, I shouldn't have been but I was. I felt when we were learning about the Babylonian numbers, it was cumbersome to write for larger numbers, which led me to think that their numbers were only for basic operations like bartering.
However, on further reflection, understanding those operations when needed, without our naming convention, isn't out of reach of the collective intelligence of any society. I don't really have justification for this, its just an intuition, but I feel convinced that the people who lived more than a millennia ago were not primitive, and are just as capable cognitively as we are, and that we were able to build on their progress to have what we have now.
3. The principle of place value is discovered four times independently.
We usually attribute contributions of ideas from one place. I underestimated how everyone has a need for math, and a function for it. The collective intelligence can work out things that we have a use for, and given that no matter where you are in the world, we will have similar problems, it makes sense that we would solve the same problem many times after reasoning through it, but was not the intuition that I had before the reading.
Jason, I like how you started with your own bias and then unpacked how the chapter challenged it — that shows real self-reflection. Your points about Babylonian cubic equations and the multiple discoveries of place value are very insightful. I especially liked your recognition that ancient people were as cognitively capable as us today — that’s an important perspective. To strengthen your reflection further, you could connect this realization to how you might approach teaching math history.
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