THREAD - Gracie here asks the question: Why did anyone come up with algebra?

She states that she thinks math (I think she means higher math) isn't real because to her there was no reason for ancient humanity to need math beyond 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples. https://twitter.com/aIeturner/status/1298372968838508546

Gracie of course doesn't even know enough about where math came from to properly decry it's early practitioners. "Where did algebra even come from?" she asks, then answers, "I know you'll say Pythagorean or whatever...".

She points out that Pythagorean would have no need for math because he didn't even have plumbing.

There's a lot to unwrap here but we'll give it a go.

1) Gracie is of the Participation Trophy generation (which actually spans a few generations now). She's never been told she's wrong. You can tell she hasn't through critically about her argument. She hasn't tried to tear it down. She can't even consider that she might be wrong.

2) Gracie, like many people, thinks mankind lived in mud huts covered in sores until roughly 1885. She can't imagine how people from 3000 BC might need higher math. She hasn't thought about how the Pyramids, Parthanon, the Hagia Sophia or the Great Wall of China were built.

In roughly 401 BC Xenophon's 10,000 Greek mercenaries were attempting to march back to Greece after Prince Cyrus, the leader of the army they were fighting with was killed during the Battle of Cunaxa.

Along the way they came across the ruins of a great city.

Xenophon described the city as having 50' thick brick walls as much as 100' high and 7 miles in circumference. Awed by the size of the walls he asked locals about the structures. They told him it had belonged to the Medes.

In actuality Xenophon was looking at the ruins of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. In 401 BC the city had already been abandoned for 200 years, long enough for locals to not even remember who built it.

Nineveh has been a city as long ago as 2000 BC and had been fortified as Xenophon saw it as long ago as 700 BC.

But if you ask Gracie there's no reason for people living back then to need higher math. These great cities and buildings just came together with luck.

3) Gracie, like many young people thinks that everyone and everything that came before them is stupid and pointless. She's incapable of seeing how everything she has today is just a new spin on something they had thousands of years ago.

Show her a sun dial or abacus and she'd ask, "What are those for?" and "Why would people back then need to know the time or need a crude calculator? They don't even have plumbing."

She can't understand how her smartphone is the natural progression of those 2 inventions. She thinks the smartphone just came into being one day. A totally new idea with no pedegree.

4) It's good she's kind of cute because she won't be making it through life on her brains.