When you steal something from someone, the other person doesn't have it any more. You can't steal ideas.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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Arguable, say someone tells you some amazing idea for an invention they plan to create and patent. You could "steal" an idea by getting a patent and manufacturing it before they get the chance to.
The issue there isn't that you've 'stolen' an idea, it's that you've lied about creating the idea.
The reason patents and copyright exist is to artificially create scarcity where there otherwise wouldn't be any. That's not neccesarily a bad thing (because there are time limits after which the ideas are freed), but I think it helps my point.
But you can steal credit. And prestige. And valor.
These are metaphorical thefts where the real crime is falsehood.
Europeans translating Al-Khwarizmi and other Arabic geniuses and putting their name on it.
Al-Khwarizmi himself stood on the shoulders of giants like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, who came up with the nine point decimal system and the numerical zero which is foundational to all modern mathematics, physics, science and technology.
The idea of “nothingness” in Hindu philosophy, especially the notion of śūnyatā (emptiness) found in early Vedic thought, provided a cultural backdrop that made the abstraction of zero conceivable. Ancient Indian scholars, immersed in concepts of void and the impermanent nature of reality, began to treat the absence of quantity as a legitimate entity rather than a mere placeholder.
Around the 5th century CE, mathematicians such as Āryabhaṭa and Brahmagupta formalized this philosophical emptiness into a numeral. Brahmagupta’s 628 CE work Brahmasphuṭasiddhānta defined zero, gave it arithmetic rules, and used a dot symbol (later a small circle) to denote it. This synthesis of metaphysical emptiness with practical computation allowed zero to enter the decimal place‑value system, eventually spreading via Arab scholars to the rest of the world.
Human history truly is remarkable. Leonardo Fibonacci's Liber Abaci refers to modus Indorum or "the method of the Indians" but does not directly cite al‑Khwarizmi’s or Abu Kamil, themselves giants in the development of Al-Jabr (Algebra).
He does however acknowledge in the foreword of the text that he is a translator and disseminator of knowledge already used elsewhere in the world.
~~When you're done jerking off your ethnosupremacism~~ you can read about "nulla", N and the cultural exchange that led to it. For as long as there was human travel there was cultural exchange. For as long as there was invention, there was theft. Considering the epochs you cited and the social organization of the time, the idea some of those concepts were co-opted from less endowed contemporaneous philosophers without attribution is non null.
~~Your post has same spiritual energy as a wehraboo.~~
I feel that your anger at the strawman you've created is not a meaningful contribution to this discourse.
Gotta love ppl who write something stupid and then edit it to put strikethrough, so they can pretend like they aren't saying it no more while still saying it.