No one disagreed that our beautiful planet was round.  The fact was well established by the Greeks – Pythagoras and Plato had had a glimmer of this fact but their inquisitive successors found more and more evidence.  By the time of Alexander, no educated Greek or Roman would deny a spherical Earth.
In holy Alexandria, scholars in tunics desperately went through the heaps of scrolls and they paced as they desperately pondered along the beaches of Egypt as the lapping Mediterranean taunted them.  Furrowing their brows, they were trying to figure out just how big this gosh darn sphere actually is.  Many of them put up excellent attempts.  Eratosthanes created an experiment using two men on different latitudes – one in Alexandria and the other in a town to the south on the Tropic of Cancer.  They would measure the angle of the sun on the summer solstice and compare the results.  Doing this, Eratosthenes concluded the world was 252,000 stadia which, depending on whether he was using Greek Stadia or Egyptian Stadia, made the world either about 46,620km or 39,690km.
When Islam conquered all of those Hellenistic lands, the muslems, most of whom had previously believed in a flat Earth, ravenously absorbed the Greek learning.   They produced some remarkable mathematicians and pushed our knowledge of the earth and the stars. Of these muslem scholars, the one who did the most remarkable work on the size of our Earth is the Persian, Abu Rayhan Biruni. He built on the Greek work about the size of the Earth and added the use of trigonometry to triangulate the distance between objects of known height and distance in relation to the sun to come to a stunningly close measure of the Earth – just a couple hundred kilometers short of the actual figure of 40,068km.

Enter to this world a brave bonehead named Cristoffa Corombo. This sailor had read all of the books by the Greeks and the Arabs and the keen intellect, through a scientific process of chicken-picking parts of theories that worked out best for his hypothesis and through confusing Italian statute miles with Arab ones, advanced the theory that the Earth’s circumference was around 25,000km.
Oy Vey!

He went all over Europe being laughed at by right-thinking people who thought he’d be committing suicide by undertaking a voyage of over 20,000km.  The determined Columbus and his brother went to every king in Europe and tried to play on their jealousy of each other.  He finally found a sympathetic ear from the Spanish monarchs who were desperate to find new revenue and edge out Portugal for trade routes to the East.  They took a risk and funded his trip.
The lucky schmuck happened to find an undiscovered continent where he thought Asia was.  And for this we in the United States have a holiday that I don’t get a day off for.
THEREFORE, I support those who want to abandon the Columbus Day holiday.  Although he can’t be blamed for what the people who followed him achieved in brutality and slavery, he himself adored brutality and slavery, often to the shock of his crew.  Columbus also sort of seems like a sad figure to me.  He spent most of his life begging for the chance to go on this voyage, only to be laughed at.  When he finally got the chance to do it, he discovered these amazing new lands only to be stripped of all his power and arrested on his return to Spain.  He died wealthy but bitter, still thinking he had discovered a route to Asia.  I don’t know why, but I imagine him really frustrated and sad.
I propose a holiday to honor Abu Rayhan Biruni and Eratosthenes and mathematicians everywhere and through all time.  Ahh, it will be the best holiday ever.  Brilliant parties can be held with guests wearing festive pocket protectors will toast their favorites “TO THE BANU MUSA!!!!” “TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON!!!” “TO EUCLID!!!!”  ”TO PIERRE de FERMAT!!!” each and everyone one responded to with a resounding “HURRAH!!!!!” “HURRAH” and a third time “HURRAH!!” from the jubilant party goers – of course Chocoleibniz, Fig Newtons and Apple Pi would be served.
But until then we fête Mr. Columbus  - we celebrate the creation of New Spains, New Englands, New Portugals, New Netherlands and New Frances in the Americas, we celebrate the destruction of civilizations, we celebrate the unfortunate spread of disease, and worst of all – we celebrate BAD MATHEMATICS.  Oh what a world, what a big round world it is after all…