History Of Mathematics

Students study the history of Mathematics for many excellent reasons. Students develop a deep understanding of the mathematics which they have been taught in class by seeing how it was developed in various places over time. It also encourages flexible thinking and creativity to students by allowing them to see historical evidence on how concepts were viewed and manipulated. Ideally, every mathematics program should cover in detail the History of mathematics. In this post, we are going to divide the history of mathematics into five distinct stages. These stages are:

• Nature's abacus
• Pythagoras
• Babylon and Egypt
• Archimedes and Euclid
• Algebra

Nature's Abacus

It is safe to the assumption that soon after the development of language, the man began counting. The counting of thumbs and fingers provided the nature's abacus. Truly, the decimal system did not come about by accident. This is because the number 10 has been the basis of most of the counting systems in the history. In the old days, notches of stones and sticks were the natural solution whenever any record was needed. However, arithmetic cannot develop easily without an effective numerical system. Due to this, the story of mathematics in the late arrival developed the idea of Zero and the concept of place value. The early history of mathematics involved geometry and algebra. At their primary level, the two of them are like mirror images of each other.

Babylon and Egypt of 1750 BC

Tracing back to 1750BC, the first surviving algebraic and geometrical calculation examples can be derived from Babylon and Egypt. Babylon was far more advanced due to their cuneiform tablets which featured quite complex algebraic problems. Any Babylonian math question would be expressed regarding geometry. However, the nature of the answers would be expressed in algebraic forms. Since the system of the numeric was unwieldy, the calculation of the questions was largely based on tables which could only survive on tablets.

Egyptian mathematics was not complicated like that of Babylon. They used Rhind papyrus which survived. The papyrus was copied by the scribe Ahmes in 1500BC. It contained brainteasers. The papyrus introduced one crucial element of algebra known as h which is used as a standard algebraic symbol to mean quantity of unknown number.

Pythagoras of 6th Century BC

During the classical period, Ancient mathematics reached the modern world through the Greek's work which was building from the Babylonian tradition. One of the known figures among the early set of Greek's mathematicians was Pythagoras.

Pythagoras moved from Greek and went to stay in Crotona; in the heel of Italy. Crotona was at that time a Greek colony. There he established a philosophical sector which they believed that numbers are the unchangeable and underlying truth of the universe. They made many discoveries which reinforced on this numerical faith. The Pythagoreans showed for example that music notes vary with the vibrating string's length. They also proved that whatever the shape of the triangle was, the triangle's three angles always added up to 180 degrees, which is equivalent to the sum of two right angles. Till today, the most famous theorem in the classical mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem. This theorem is typically an achievement of the Greek mathematicians whose primary interest was geometry.

This interest reached the peak through a compiled work by Euclid in 300BC.