>> Hahaha! Isn't China that country that *has* an alphabet, but it's 
>> 22,000 characters or something absurd?
> 
> No, it's not an alphabet. It's writing, but there aren't phonetic 
> letters you rearrange to make words, which is what "alphabet" means. 
> From the greek Alpha Beta.

They're ideograms not phonograms, but I'm not aware that this 
disqualifies them as an "alphabet". It is after all a finite set of 
symbols having well-defined meanings - they just don't mean phonetics.

>> Notice the huge gap in the middle, and the much smaller gap between 
>> then and now? I'm sure other mathematicians *existed*, they just 
>> weren't especially famous... ;-)
> 
> Well, anyone whose name we still know 500+ years later would probably 
> fall under "especially famous" for me. Of course there might be a big 
> gap when you list individual mathematicians. You're not graphing famous 
> mathematicians.
> 
> http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Full_Chron.html

Most of the people in that list, I've never heard of. And I've heard of 
people like Chebyshev that most people wouldn't recognise.

Maybe it's just that all the people who discovered stuff that you'd 
learn about in an extremely basic math course lived a long time ago? For 
example, Andrew Wiles famously proved Fermat's Last Theorum - or rather, 
proved that all modular forms are elliptic. But apparently only a few 
people alive can actually comprehend the proof, so...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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