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  • Writer's pictureMath Space BP. Malaysia
    • Oct 1, 2022
    • 5 min read

THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS

Abstract|

This is an article that introduces the three greatest periods which are Babylon, Egypt and Greek’s maths to let everyone who read this article know what they are learning and its origin.

Mathematics is the main support that has helped us in the development of vital categories. For instance,careers such as financial analyst, auditor, medical scientist and others. Nevertheless,we have been using mathematics for over 2000 years, there are many of us that can proudly say they know exactly about the history of maths. Therefore, I would like to start a magnificent journey to reveal the history of maths to all of you.


About 3000 years ago, a crowd of people gathered together passionately to investigate what they found just now—they were ancient Sumerians. The first maths was found in Mesopotamia, they created a system of maths which is called the sexagesimal number system, a base 60 system. These imaginative people had created the first positional notation. The first appearance of this system was around 2000 before Christ. For the understanding, I will lift up an example. For instance,1,57,46,40 can be represented in the decimal place just like below:


1×603+57×602+46×60+40


Thus, this sexagesimal can be represented into 424000 in decimal places.




The diagram above shows the complete symbols for the foundation of ancient Sumerians’ maths. Suppose that when Sumerian face multiplication problems, they will use sexagesimal to solve it. Furthermore, they have created the Mesopotamia of measurement in order to utilise it in their life. For instance, they have created a series of units to measure length.

Apart from that, I would like to start our journey again to the maths in Egyptian. I believe that most of you have heard that the Egyptian was an expert in Astronomy.These imaginative people had used it in Ancient Egypt between 3000 to 300 before Chrits. For the application of maths in their life, it is not only the Astronomy category, but in counting and solving written mathematics problems such as constructing pyramids.


They will use the maths to calculate the angle of each direction in order to construct a glamorous impressive pyramid .Even though they often use it in multiplication and fraction. Ancient Egypt maths, like most other ancient maths, is hieroglyphic, the diagram below has represented the hieroglyph and its value.

Like the Romans’ maths, ancient Egypt used decimal schemes to express their maths. Furthermore,the expression of this maths will be the value of the number will equal to the time appeared of the symbol. For instance,


can be written as(2(10)+4(1))=24,








therefore,



can be written in 24 in decimal forms.






Moreover, the multiplication of ancient Egypt is still fascinating. Ancient Egyptian form of multiplication which is also called Doubling, we first assume that we are doing a maths question, 35*41, this is quite a tough question, right? Nonetheless, the multiplication will first separate them by 2 columns, and then we will write number 1 in the first column and the second will be written as the number in the first column multiplied by 41.




Subsequently, the next number in the first column will be multiplied by 2 and this step will be repeated until the first column has the closest number with the 35.


Consequently, we will add the product of the number in first column and add them until the number in the first column has the same value with 35, we will then add the product of these number and we will get that:

35*41=41+82+1312 =1435 However, this method is not suitable for all problems of multiplication but we can understand the distributive property of multiplication which means this method is still useful till now.

For the application of Egypt maths in 2022, it is still essential in our society as this maths has helped in the development of geometry to the Egyptians and also contributed to the Science and Maths as they developed decimal systems and used it to keep track with their business. Last but not least, we are apart from the last destination, which is Greek maths. Greek maths does not have a complete documentary to record its origin. We can only know that it is generally affected by their neighbour, Babylonian and Egyptian, which are experts in maths. We can generally distinguish Greek maths in two periods:Archaic and Classical periods, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Today I would like to emphasise the Archaic and Classical periods.

Greek maths allegedly began with Thales of Miletus, a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and pre-Socratic philosopher from Ionia, Asia Minor. He had gone to Babylon and he brought back what he had learnt from there, and then he came up with a new theory, Thales’s theorem. Thales’s theorem is a special case of the inscribed angle theorem, it’s related to right triangles inscribed in certain circumstances.



Then I will prove how it works to all of you. We will first split the triangle into two parts, which is splitted by line BO and then it will create two isolated triangles, AOB and OBC.


As OB, OC and OA are all radii, thus they have the same length and they both are isosceles triangles, therefore two angle alpha are equal and two angle beta are equal. In any triangle, the interior angle is always 180 degrees. Hence, we can make a conclusion which is 2 alpha + 2 beta = 180 degrees, and we can divide it by 2 and we can know that alpha+ beta = 90 degrees. Moreover, this theory is also essential for our real life, for instance, 3D graphics, video games,painting and art. Apart from that, this theory has helped us in estimating the height of the pyramid and also measuring the width of the river. Since we have learnt many ancient maths, I would like to share my own opinion of maths to all of you. For me, maths is the foundation for humans to build up our own civilization as when we are trying to build a building, we need different theories in order to estimate the height and the sustainability of the buildings. In other circumstances, this universe is built by many physics theories which means that the calculation is indispensable in order to explore the whole world’s appearance. Apart from that, the Internet is necessary in our daily life in this decade. The binary code is a part of maths and it shows how related future life is with maths followed by the increasing roles of the Internet in our lives for communication, information sharing and updating. In conclusion, what we have learnt today has fully shown the development of maths in ancient times. The multiplications of Egypt has helped us in understanding how to do simple multiplications without calculators and more easier and the Thales’s theorem is dominant to the geometry while the Mesopotamia maths has opened a new door that leads our civilization to higher categories, and the assistance of this development has a general name, Mathematics.



 



 

AUTHOR


TOH KAI XIANG


Hi! My name is Toh Kai Xiang, I am from Batu Pahat. I love to investigate some histories of this world. Among the history of this world, I find that the most fascinating history is maths, as is the most dominant category to build up the world.

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