The Americas Were Discovered Because of a Math Mistake
When Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain in 1492, he was convinced that he was less than 3000 miles away from Japan. All he had to do was sail a little more beyond that, and he would reach the Indies, with their rich spice trade. As it turned out, Japan is about 12,000 miles away from Spain, not 3000. The reason Columbus thought it was much closer was because he made a mistake when he calculated the size of the globe, and concluded it was far smaller than it actually is.
That was probably the most momentous math mistake – or just plain mistake, period – in history. Contrary to myth, neither Columbus nor his crew feared that they might fall off the edge of the world. The Ancient Greeks already knew that the earth was a globe two millennia earlier, and educated people and sailors in Columbus’s day had no illusions about the earth being flat. The issue for Columbus was not the shape of the earth, but the size of the ocean that he planned to cross.
