How a Mathematical Superstition Stultified Algebra for Over a Thousand Years

Robert Coolman:

later, as a graduate researcher of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, I realized that by not knowing anything about the origins of these branches of mathematics, I was missing out on something extremely important. I began rummaging through this history to see their elaborate unfolding myself and, to my surprise, found that geometry was far more developed than algebra for a long time: Geometric solutions to many mathematical problems were discovered more than a millennium before their algebraic equivalents.

This is the story of how an ancient, arbitrary rule of Greek thinkers obstructed algebra’s progress for more than a thousand years, and how a peculiar loophole allowed geometry to anticipate mathematics far ahead of its time.