Science in Latin America

Abstract

Excellence in science and technology has a long tradition in Latin America.The elegant curved walls of El Caracol ("The Snail") set it apart among the other, quadrangular monuments that grace the archaeological Mayan site of Chichen Itza, in the YucatAn Peninsula of Mexico.El Caracol is the most magnificent ancient astronomical observatory standing in the world, built while Europe lay in the Dark Ages.Slanted openings in the walls and roof allowed Mayan astronomers to observe the alignments and measure the movements of planets and stars.Mayan astronomers contrived precise tables for the positions of Venus and Mars and predicted solar eclipses.They developed a dual calendar that identified every one of the 18,980 days in a cycle of 52 years by a combination of a name and a number.The Mayans' advanced mathematics included the invention of the zero and positional notation.Mayan knowledge and history are recorded in stellae, monuments, and codices written in a language with 850 hieroglyphic and phonetic characters.The city of Cuzco (Quechua for "Navel"), perched 4000 m above sea level in what is now Peru, was, when Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1533, the capital of an Inca empire that covered most of South America west of the Andes, and commanded a population of 12 million people.The Incas had domesticated guinea pigs, ducks, llamas, alpacas, and dogs, and cultivated corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cassava, coca, peanuts, and cotton.The Incas, like the Romans, maintained dominance over the empire through an array of roads that facilitated rapid communication between distant parts of the empire and the governing center.Two 3600-km-long systems of roads, one along the coast and the other along the Andes, made possible a relay service that, without horses, conveyed messages at a rate of 250 km per day.During the colonial period of the 16th and 17th centuries, 30 universities were founded in Spanish America, well in keeping with policies then prevailing in Spain, where in the 16th century the proportion of university students was greater than anywhere else in Europe.The New World universities provided education to the economic, political, and religious elites, but, like contemporary universities in

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