Thursday, March 28, 2024

Arthur Lewin; The African Origins Of Math And Science…

April 29, 2011 by  
Filed under Education, News, Opinion, Weekly Columns

Like
Like Love Haha Wow Sad Angry

(ThyBlackMan.com)  What do you mean you can’t do math? You invented it!

An animal bone, with markings used for counting, discovered in South Africa is estimated to be more than 35,000 years old. Another bone, the Ishango Bone, found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not only has markings for counting, but also prime numbers which indicate it was used for calculating. It is 10,000 years old.

 
Agriculture, the purposeful planting, cultivating and harvesting of foodstuffs has been taking place along the Nile Valley for 18,000 years. Steel was produced in furnaces in Tanzania 2,000 years ago. And there were  astronomical observatories in Kenya in 300 BC. Furthermore, it’s believed that shafts located in the 5,000-year-old Great Pyramid at Giza functioned as observatories for viewing the star Sirius and other heavenly bodies.

 
The Dogon people of Mali, and other ethnic groups living in the vicinity of the ancient city of Timbuktu, have an intimate knowledge of this solar system, the Sirius star system, and the shape and functioning of the galaxy. When Europeans first encountered them, they thought many Dogon beliefs were fables until, that is, the Europeans developed telescopes and realized the Dogon were correct in virtually all their observations.

 
An accurate model of a glider airplane was found in Egypt, and it is believed to be 2400 years old. It has a distinctive shape resembling that of the Hercules transport aircraft used today by the US Army.

 
The vast majority of those labeled as ancient “Greek philosophers,” had spent extended periods of time as foreign students, in the universities of ancient Egypt. Two thousand years later, the European Renaissance and the subsequent period of Enlightenment were spurred on by renewed contact with Egyptian and other African sources of knowledge.
 

During the centuries of African bondage in the Americas, Africans could not legally lay claim to their many inventions, like the cotton gin, which is falsely attributed to Eli Whitney. In the years afterwards, however, numerous African Americans have had their discoveries openly recorded and acknowledged. They include George Washington Carver who revolutionized American agriculture by demonstrating that 300 products could be derived from the peanut, and one hundred from the sweet potato, Garrett Morgan who invented the gas mask and the traffic signal, Lewis Lattimer who gave us the filament for the light bulb, Jan Matzeliger who invented the machine that makes shoes, and Charles Drew who gave us blood plasma, just to name a few.

Isaac Gilliam, George Carruthers, Mae Jemison and Patricia Cowings are just some of the African Americans who have made, and are making, valuable contributions to the American space program. Dr. Ben Carson, pre-eminent brain surgeon, exemplifies the abilities and contributions of the thousands of African American physicians.
 

African born students on America’s college campuses outperform all other demographic groups. Two examples of contemporary African scientific excellence are Nigerian born Drs. Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo. Emeagwali prepared and conducted the world’s fastest computer computation – 3.1 billion calculations per second. His astounding accomplishments have changed the way global warming, weather conditions, and underground oil flows are charted and predicted.
 

Dr. Gabriel Oyibo has offered a proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity and attempted to solve the central riddle at the heart of physics for the last 80 years, that is, to develop a “theory of everything.” Oyibo has proposed a master theory that unifies Quantum Theory, Relativity and all the heretofore-unconnected theoretical systems of modern physics in one set of equations. And so we see that Africa and Africans have been and still are at the cutting edge of the development of science and technology from the very dawn of humanity right up until today.

Staff Writer; Arthur Lewin

This talented writer has also self published a book which is entitled; Read Like Your Life Depends On It.


Comments

2 Responses to “Arthur Lewin; The African Origins Of Math And Science…”
  1. Huylebrouck says:

    There is not 1 Ishango rod, but there are 2. The second was revealed by the discoverer on his death bed.
    Note the Ishango rod probably does NOT show “prime” numbers, but definitively was a counting device, something that is not at all sure for that South African bone.
    I have some movies about it on YouTube.

Speak Your Mind

Tell us what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!