I can't resist the following observations:
The development of Greek
geometry took place, roughly,
between 600 B.C. (according to legends
about Pythagoras and Thales) and 300 B.C.
With Euclid, the basic idea of mathematics as
reasoning was in place,
and it only remained to get
the details straight. True, that took a while.
It is curious to contrast this
with the history of calculation
and notation of numbers.
In some sense it began about 8000 B.C.
when the people in what is now northern Iraq
moved into the Tigris-Euphrates delta
and started recording agricultural transactions.
By the year 2000 B.C. they had developed an extremely
impressive system of calculation. For reasons
we don't understand, this languished - the computational
techniques of the Greeks, until Greek astronomers
absorbed Babylonian methods, was very primitive,
modeled apparently on the very awkward Egyptian
methods of handling fractions.
And it wasn't until about 1450 that a fully developed
decimal place-value system, including decimal
fractions, was developed in Islam,
with major contributions from India.
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