Th e logical Greek versus the imaginative Oriental 275
by labelling it the ‘forthright formulation’ of the ideology under scrutiny.
But a few words on Biot are in order here to put his essay–review in context.
Already in 1834, L. A. Sédillot had stridently claimed the originality of
Arabic science, basing his argument on his alleged fi nding that a tenth-
century Arab astronomer had discovered the third inequality of the moon,
600 years before Tycho Brahe. Biot soon became a passionate opponent of
Sédillot in an unending debate that occupied the Paris Academy of Science
for more than 40 years. Biot, who in his polemic pieces against Sédillot
revealed a profoundly anti-Arab ideology, was more candid with regard
to Chinese and Indian science, about which he wrote numerous essays
collected at the end of his life in his Études sur l’astronomie indienne et sur
l’astronomie chinoise (Paris, 1862). His son Edouard (1803–50), who had
abandoned a liberal career for the study of sinology, was probably the fi rst
European who, aft er the Jesuits, made available new sources on Chinese
mathematics; he published three papers on this topic between 1835 and
- Together with K. L. Biernatzki’s famous paper on Chinese arithmetic
and algebra printed in Crelle’s Journal für reine und angewandte Mathematik
in 1856 (and based entirely on various newspaper articles by the Protestant
missionary in China Alexander Wylie), E. Biot’s contributions constituted
the very few fragments of Chinese mathematics available to European histo-
rians until the beginning of the twentieth century. 2 For Indian mathematics,
Biot senior could rely on the widely available publications of British
Sanskritists such as Henry Th omas Colebrooke (1765–1837), as well as on
an increasing secondary literature based on them. Th is, of course, put J. B.
Biot in a position of authority to judge Oriental science.
Before examining in more details the contexts and the evolution of the
idea so precisely enunciated by Biot, let us contrast it with the view of a
German historian of mathematics, Siegmund Günther (1848–1923), who,
in 1908, nicely summarized the researches of the second half of the nine-
teenth century on the matter. In a chapter devoted to Indian mathematics,
Günther wrote the following:
But this [Indian] mathematics has such a peculiar character, that a study thereof is
assured to guarantee the highest lure. In particular, one can only be fascinated by
the fundamental opposition between the Indian and Greek ways of thinking and
of looking at things. Th e Greek is – with a few exceptions confi rming the rule –
a rigid synthetician, whose emphasis lies fully on rigorous demonstrations and who
lives so much in spatial considerations that he will almost invariably attempt to
cloth even arithmetical things into geometrical garments. Conversely, the Indian,
being exceptionally gift ed for everything computational, has very little appeal to
2 Martzloff 1997 : 4–5.