I look forward to reading Jeffery Burton Russell's book,
"Inventing the Flat Earth". Pedagogical techniques brought
about the flat earth concept of history, and not any real
historical context that Cristobal Colon would have recognized,
as Russell's HM book review reported.
Pointing to Columbus' third trip to the New World, and the
Jamaica 'shipwrecked' sailors were saved by Columbus easily
predicting an eclipse. Note that Columbus had to know the
proper longitude of Jamaica, time-wise, to scare the natives
into supplying food to them.
In passing, Bill Everdell's post that cited: "And as to
mathematician's "contempt" for history, I have found little
of it in my own reading and am fascinnated by the examples
in this thread." For sure there is little, if any, direct
contempt for history; therefore I agree with Bill. However,
recalling the 17 year Otto Neugebauer, David Pingree debate,
1972-1989, in THE JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY, indirect
contempt for history has been found far too often by taking
(pro-Hellene) pedagogical positions based on preconceieved notions.
That is, Otto Neugebauer was posing his own form of Flat Earth
'straw-man' to build up Greeks, and knock down ancient Egyptians
as solid mathematicians. One day I hope that the historical
errors listed in Neugebauer's EXACT SCIENCES IN ANTIQUITY
and his defenses thereof, will be corrected. Here I speak
of the 1920's position taken by DE Smith, that Neugebauer
supported, that Egyptian arithmetic was only additive (based
on logistica) and not number theory (arithmoi) based.
A fuller reading of the EMLR, that was not translated until
1927, shows that its 1/p and 1/pq series used the same proto-
number theory used in the RMP 2/nth table's 2/p and 2/pq
series.
One EMLR example will close this post. Of the 26 EMLR series,
11 used:
1/pq = 1/A x A/pq
where A could be any number (such as 5 and 25)
the same 2/pq rule is easily seen in 24 of its series, stated
in the form:
2/pq = 2/A x A/pq
where A = (p + 1) and (p + q).
Regards to all,
Milo Gardner