lack of knowledge and lack of logic you may not know that the great chinese have something that is called 九章算術 (the nine chapters on the mathematical art), where deep math was developed. one of the chapters even discussed Gaussian elimination, which you would learn in a linear algebra class (Gauss re-discovered the method in the early 19th century, which was 2000 years later). right, we did not invent calculus per se. however, the idea of calculus existed in china long time ago. 劉徽 and 祖沖之's algorithms of finding pi (in turn the area of a circle and the volume of a sphere) may be beyond your ken. as near as in the 14th century, 朱世傑 solved polynomial equations. speaking of equations, the word 'algebra' was not even invented by westerners. it was invented somewhere else. you were blinded by modern science and technology. remember, abstract algebra did not get developed until in the 19th century. how can you say that the chinese would never be able to develop something like this or calculus in the next 5000 years? notice that all the great chinese mathematicians i mentioned here spoke and wrote in chinese, and therefore likely they thought in chinese, not in english.