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Africans Invented Mathematics |
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Nothing shows the brilliance of Africans more than their invention and perfection of counting by Primitive Africans and abstract math (e.g. fractions) by Ancient Africans. Both are universal languages. They used their right brains to put a situation into context, for spatial judgments, perception, intuition, and artistic ability; their left brains for analysis and to figure out ways to survive and thrive. When villages started they needed math to count the villagers and a host of other things--all leading to the formation of number words. A Number is a symbol or word indicating how many of or where something is located in a series.
To barter they learned to add, to hold up fingers to indicate numbers, and to represent large numbers by pebbles, knots on a rope, or notches on a stick or bone. Stones were put in a bag to convey how much of something was ownedâ€"the reason why "calculate" comes from the Latin word for "stone". To have a symmetrical final result in the exchange of goods, bartering required an "equal sign" between goods to its right and something to its left. That balance led to abstract concepts of "Fairness" and Justice. Hence, in early Africa the "equal sign" became a keystone of math. Another resulted from observing the sun/moon, man/woman, and night/day as balanced complementary opposites and with both being equally significant but in different ways.
This concept, now known as Yin/Yang, is the realization that things which appear to be different can actually be the same in their most essential aspects.
The "equal sign" and Yin/Yang mean "Chaos" and "Order" are complimentary equals because each contains things involved in the other. Also, to discover the truth of one of the two opposites separated by an "equal sign" is to discover Yin/Yang principles in the other. This was the beginning of using symbols for unknowns and of Inductive and deductive reasoning. The presence of math allowed Ancient Africans to make sense of their lives while the presence of chaos--the absence of math--meant disharmony for all. These brilliant observations and inferences led to the realization that all planets in the sky, all creatures on earth, and all God's creations operated out of the same systemâ€"a system composed of only a few "seed" Truthsâ€"a system of "seed", "root", and "trunk" Truths operating uniquely on different planes of existenceâ€"a system based on mathematics.
In Africans' daily lives, math played out in an infinite number of ways-- e.g. in throwing spears or in navigating across the waters 30,000 years ago or in business (for others see Zaslavsky's book: "Africa Counts"). Because during this Ice Age period Africa was like a paradise (by being so close to the equator), Africans had an abundance of food. Resultant leisure allowed for deep cosmos and selfhood thinking. Despite fearing disturbing acts of nature, they were awed by the continuity and orderliness of life; by the predictability of the cycles of growth; and by the apparent peacefulness of the sky. Africans saw Knowledge as Power from knowing those laws of nature presumably giving them the ability to control or to govern their environment and therefore their own lives. Behind this motivation to eagerly learn knowledge (the key concept inside "math") was their intense enjoyment of earthly life--and to the point of not wanting it to end once they died. Thus, reaching the heaven Afterlife became Africans' ultimate objective.
But how? A starting brilliant insight was to understand "Order" as the way to discover the Truth--and there was nothing better ordered in truth than the stars in the sky. A second was learning about cosmic rhythmsâ€"since rhythms are inside order--since rhythms consist of vibrationsâ€"and since vibrations are about math. To these ends, they systematically began watching the positions and motions of the stars and heavenly bodies.
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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