Three things that surprised me from the article:
1) "Numbers were identified with the various gods. He considered the odd numbers to be male and the even ones to be female. He made a strange distinction between the "divine number," a sort of general concept of number which existed only in the mind of the creator-god, and scientific numbers, which were the common numbers known to men on earth." - pg. 267 I find it surprising that numbers were once identified with gods, as if nobody could really know where they came from. I am also curious about how they determined odd numbers to be male and even numbers to be female.
2) "The arithmetic of the schools did not receive the wholehearted approbation of all the people." - pg. 271 Considering how mathematics is used as a basis in many fields (such as science, engineering, architecture, etc...), I find it mind-boggling that it was once received as something rather trivial and not of importance.
3) "Dialectic or logic became so important that it tended to obscure all the other arts." - pg. 270
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