Horusmaster Wrote:obviously lack of communication between whites and asians at that time.If whites value intellectual properties more than Asians, why is it that Asian parents are stricter than white parents when it comes to school?
And because of the culture difference. Whites value intellictual properties alot more than asians. In the asian community, when someone discovers something, he won't get his name next to every equation he made. The person's discovery is usually mentioned without the person's name when applying them.
And what do you mean by usefulness? Did pascal discovered a "use" for pascal's triangle, asides from the properties that is already known by the chinese?
Probability.
Worthyness Wrote:You can't say that he wasn't smart enough to find an answer per se. Maybe he had been working on it and happened to not live long enough to find a use for it. Who's to say that he DIDN'T find a usefor it and that he just didn't have time to publish it all? I, mister argue. If he found a way to use it, he would publish it: "I found a mathematical proof which proves that God exist, but I don't want to publish it. You can't deny that I'm a smart person because of that." For all we know, he DID find a use for it and he hid it in some mountain cave so no one would find it and use it for some random purpose (unlikely, but this is all speculation and guessing for the most part). We can only guess until we get a time machine and ask him what the hell he was thinking about.
All those mathematicians/scientists must have had some sort of motivation/ previous work to go off of. We can't tell if the Asian guy (i think he's named Yang Hui), given the same resorces of Pascal, could have done just the same as Pascal. Of course we can't, but why should we bother to think about that? It's completely irrelevant. What I say, is that Pascal found a way of using the triangle that noone else did before him. Noone did that before him. Noone. All we know is he found something before someone else, but didn't get his name on it. He found a use of it. Albert Einstein did not make differential geometry, Riemann did. But Alberto found a use for it.
(From this) i say we are all capable of doing great things, it's just a matter of how motivated we are and how much support and such we have behind us. From what i see, people can be motivated in a situation that is utter crap OR a situation that is incredibly high in support. Hell, I've seen it happen. People can choose whether or not they want to be "smart", but it's not all black and white. There are other factors that can affect the motivation of certain people like the group they hang out with, their racial sterotypes, etc. This, I agree with.