Medieval

Please read this piece and blog on three quotes from the article that made you stop and that surprised you in some way.

one thing is that "in the trivium of the

medieval university. Logistic was practical

and utilitarian, a study for children and

slaves; logic was a liberal art, a study for

free men."

eh.... yah. It seems like the theoretical/intellectual enjoyment are solely for the free men. There is a distinction between the classes. Well, I think this is kind of true nowadays too. Some people learn math or science just for a living. while some people learn it for the enjoyment. but it comes to the individual thinking and habits though, mostly, I think , for today's population. since most of the people are not starving. 

Also one of the mathematicians "wrote much on number mysticism, a sort of theology of numbers. Numbers were identified with the various gods. He considered the odd numbers to be male and the even ones to be female." This is similar to the number with personalities. "He made a strange distinction between the "divine number," a sort of general concept of number which existed only in the mind of the creator-god, and scientific numbers,   which were the common numbers known to men on earth." 

This is quite cool actually. however there is a question, how does he know what is divine??? it might just be from intuition. from God? ...well, it is quite an interesting topic but I doubt the truth of it. 

Another thing is that "To him, a pound is a perfect weight because it has the same number of ounces as there are months in a year.27 He is deeply religious and finds mystic and scriptural significance in all numbers. The fact that

God performed 22 works in creation is ade quate explanation for Isidore as to why there are 22 generations from Adam to Jacob, 22 books of the Old Testament to Esther""Take number from all things and all things perish."

However, isn't the number of ounces in a pound determined by humans? and why does that make it a perfect weight? haha. Seems like the medieval people are really religious. So there are mystic and scriptural significance in numbers. well, I partly agree. There should be something mystical about everything. However, I don't think that "Take number from all things and all things perish." I rather think that numbers are what we use to describe the world and make it more systematic/logically consistent. We put everything in a grid to create a world (an image). however the things are independent from numbers...actually. But it's quite an interesting statement though.