I saw an interesting book title and impulsively splashed down the money for it: “The Language of Mathematics: The Stories Behind the Symbols”, by Raul Rojas.
My gross failure to do Due Diligence. Prof. Rojas wrote his fascinating book in Spanish, and it was later translated to English by the denizens of Princeton U. The ladies at Princeton (publishing is dominated by females) had assiduously converted all Prof. Rojas’s good Catholic BCs and ADs to dreadful politically-correct BCEs and CEs. My normal rule is to stop reading when coming across the first BCE – because it likely indicates a weak mind which has been perverted by wokeness – but I had already paid for the book, Dammit!
Some people adjust to this modern perversion of the centuries-old method of dating by interpreting BCE as “Before the Christian Era” and CE as “Christian Era”. But why should we play their game? Far Lefties mean CE to stand for “Common Era” – which raises the reasonable question of: Common to Whom?
Is relabeled Christian BC/AD dating really common to Zoroastrians? Muslims? Buddhists? Confucians? Of course not! The Far Lefties so-called “Common Era” is common only to the once-Christian European nations left behind by the Roman Empire and to some of their former colonies. Indeed, when Far Lefties impose the perversion of “Common Era” on the diverse peoples of the world, it is not only dreadfully condescending – it is repugnantly racist on their part!
One of the interesting symbols Prof. Rojas writes about is the humble zero (symbol 0). The Romans did not have zero, and apparently did not miss it. They had X for 10, C for 100, M for 1,000 – and using those symbols they did all the complex calculations required for exacting surveys of aqueducts and construction of massive edifices which still stand today. Zero had been invented in India many years before the rise of Rome … but no-one ever told the Romans.
The lack of zero clearly did not hold the Romans back, but it did have one interesting consequence. When Roman Christians calculated the birth of Jesus, they had to date His birth year as Year 1, since they had no symbol for Year 0. That little adjustment persists to the present day, when ignorant Far Leftie media types pronounced the year 2000 as the start of the Third Millenium, since they were too benighted to understand that the Third Millenium did not begin until January 1, 2001.