>>17929201
In what world do you think blast furnaces are of limited utility? The chinese had finery forges to process the not inconsiderable amount of pig iron they produced into wrought iron which was then processed into steel since the 3rd century bc. With a blast furnace you are getting much more yield and purer iron than any bloomery furnace could pull out of ore. By the Tang the gap is arguably pretty big as by that point they already have gunpowder and astronomical clocks. They may have not had euclidean geometry but they did have the 9 chapters which discussed geometry and systems of equations and gaussian elimination. Rome didnt really even have a true number system. You could do math with it but it wasnt particularly great. Admittedly chinese numerals werent great either but rod numerals are far more applicable to math than roman numerals because they are a positional numeral system. Ultimately it would be the indian numerals that came out on top cause it was easier to write with.