Where would we be now

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Roman contributions to mathematics were minimal. This includes Alexandria after the Roman conquest and Byzantium. Most of the action before the final collapse was taking place in the Islamic Domains, which are not under Roman control.

Culturally, the Romans were Phillistines.

But they sure did build great stuff. They built great works and got the chariots and wagons to run on time on their roads. The Dome of the Pantheon is fantastic and they did it with a minimum of math or theory.

ruveyn

How do you expect anyone to make significant advances in theoretical mathematics with such a crippled and cumbersome notation system as the Romans used? It was barely even serviceable for rudimentary arithmetic. Imagine trying to do calculus using Roman numerals!

All mankind started out using the simple tally. Why didn't the Romans, Greeks, Hebrews figure out how to do positional notation. The Babylonians and the Chinese did, as did the Hindus.

I suppose if the Romans got far enough east to conquer India, they might have picked up on the positional notation. Romans were very smart borrowers. Whenever they saw something that worked, they grabbed and sometimes even improved it.

ruveyn

In the way that people extrapolate that poster to theism in general - yes, the blatantly obvious that Athens and Rome were very theistic in their own ways. Sticking to strict content though, if one really wanted to ignore the boom bust cycle of cultures couldn't they say that polytheism lead to the mess that it was too late for Christianity to fix and the polytheists did so horribly that it took Christians a and a half millennium to bring things back on track? I guess it all goes to show that if people want to ignore real causes (which in this case were almost wholly areligious) they can try twisting it whatever way they want.