Re:Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
by riazrizvi on Sunday August 25, 2019 @01:05AM
(#20791465)
Clearly by the 13th Century China could be considered a technological forerunner, but then the Mongols took over. I suspect the cultural tendencies of the Chinese civil service that drove innovation just couldn’t weather the merging of cultures and the scholarly edge of Chinese culture was collateral damage.
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Re:Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics?
by dredmorbius on Sunday August 25, 2019 @01:32AM
(#20791521)
I'm still very weak on my Chinese history, but it was the turning-inward of the Ming dynasty (15th century), not the Mongol invasions, which precipitated the halt.
Also (as already mentioned in this thread), the asset-sheltering tendency of established power groups, halting the emergence of potential rivals, as Bernhard Stern documents in other (non-Chinese) instances.