DLESE description of Ancient Roots of Modern Science

This 48 minute radio broadcast discusses the history of science from around the globe, and looks at the ancient roots of modern scientific thought. The math and science of the ancient Greeks as well as some ancient scientific thinkers, including Aristotle and Ptolemy, are well known. But what about people and ideas from the rest of the world? In Asia, Egypt and the Middle East, scientific thinkers developed their own astronomy, math, and even physics. But some of those discoveries were lost, or ignored by Western thinkers. The show considers the possibility that Copernicus used ideas from Islamic science; what happened to the preeminence of Islamic science; how the Mayan and Indians invented the number zero; why such fields as algebra and trigonometry may have been developed; and how many of the ancient works remain unread.