Fair enough and duly noted. For the record, I’m hardly disparaging creativeness at any level; simply asserting that modern achievement pales in comparison to the past.
Consider that in 330 BC:
* Euclid defined a point in a space and then a second point somewhere else in that space; separated horizontally.
* Next he defined an infinite number of points between the first two, creating a line.
* Next he defined points from the end points of the horizontal line, creating two vertical lines.
* Then he defined points horizontally from the end points of the vertical lines, creating a second horizontal line.
Now he had a rectangle or square, a 2-dimensional shape!
This definition can be extended, in space, to create a prism or cube, a 3-dimensional shape; and so on to include all the other geometric forms.
Euclid defined shape, the basis for structure, which we take for granted and w/o which we would likely still be living in caves. And just reflect a moment; he managed to achieve this w/o a college degree!!!
My starting point was direct and simple. We moderns preen w/the conceit that we are the greatest ever; which is bullshit way past the 10th power. Proof? Look at the world around us since the French Enlightenment.
I”ll see your Euclid and raise you Stonehenge. The English had geometry down about 2200 years before Euclid was born ;)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/stonehenge-builders-had-geometry-skills-to-rival-pythagoras-834313.html
http://www.stonehenge.tv/geometry.html
I think advanced thinking has been around since the first cooperative defense farm settlements allowed for some leisure time. Environmental catastrophe, epidemics, social constraints on free thought, invasions or war where every library was burned, all contribute to wiping out the knowledge base; the wheel has to be reinvented again and again and again from the ashes. England in the 1800s and America in the 1900s made great strides under an environment of free thought, just as Greece did in its time, and likely will again.