DO HISTORIANS HATE STRATEGY?
Do hisorians lie?:
- In the 50's, novelist Rebecca West covered the trials of British WWII "traitors" (and
wrote the book, The Meaning of Treason; her peers called her "the best reporter of our
time". On PBS, Bill Moyers asked her why, with all she had to do, did she take time to cover
the Nuremberg Trials of 19xx. West: "I felt that I had to. Historians are such liars, you know."
- Later, on PBS, MacNeil interviewed John Le Carré, the spy novelists, who said:
"History is the lie on which historians find consensus."
- In George Bernard Shaw's play, The Devil's Disciple, about the American Revolution -- filmed in
1959, with Lawrence Olivier, Bert Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas -- the British character, General
Burgoyne, said: "Historials will tell the usual lie."
Historians (and text-book writers) do not tell you that one of the principal charges of The Inquisition against Galileo (x-y) was that he was a "Pythagorean" (in promoting a law of falling bodies) by agreeing with Pythagoras that arithmetic could describe motion.
Historians do not tell you about the difficulties of teaching and using Roman numerals for calculating and other purposes.
For example, every educated person should know about an 1157 letter replying to a merchant father who wished to know how to educate his son in commercial calculating. The father was told that, to learn addition and subtraction in Roman numeration, local pre-university schools would suffice; to learn multiplication in Roman numeration, the son could go to some nearby
university; but there was only only place in Europe where the son could learn division in Roman numeration -- at the
University of Bologna.
Historians do not tell you that, prior to 1201 (see next irem), any person possessing a manuscript containing Hindu-Arabic decimal numeration could be charged with heresy by Church authorities or as a spy by secular authorities.
Historians do not explain the historic change in Europe due to the introduction of decimal numberation (to replace Roman numerals) by Fibonacci (x-y) in his Liber Abacci in 1201. Can you imagine doing your bank book or your IRS form in Roman numerals? The great Age of Trade, which opened soon after Fiboniacci's work, would have found the bookkeeping impossible without decimal numeration. The great Age of Navigation (leading to the discovery of our continent), which opened soon after The Age of Trade, would have found navigational calculations impossible without decimal numeration.
Where historians do cite originators of scimath, they are often incorrect. For example, citing "Newton's differential equations of motion", which Leonard Euler wrote out 40 years after Newton's death.
See! See! The historian hyperbolic!
Mad as mythorian with colic,
He hath disavowed math
And all that math hath
Endowed for our great body politic.
He shall be forgiven,
His sense sins quite shriven,
By getting high on a high colonic.
(An octerick is my extension of a limerick, from 5 lines to 8, to allow for a double whammy.)
ANGEL BUYS1 MESSAGE