A Brief History Of Math_33447

How did math come about? Where did it first start? For many who are well versed in the origins of mathematical thought, the development of mathematics will reveal itself to a continuous and ever-improving (and growing) set of expressions of subject matter. The initial abstraction, which many animals share with us, are numbers. What do I mean by that? Well, the recognition that a certain number of objects such as 2 trees and 2 bananas are similar in their allotment.This adroitness to recognise allotment and recurrences of allotment is often considered to be the first abstraction. A step up from the initial abstraction the ability to sense and to percieve abstract non-tangible quantities such as time and elementary arithmetic. One does not have to see actually see that 3 objects subtracted from 4 objects is 1 object. From there, it is only natural that subtraction, multiplication and division began. In fact, mathematics precedes written script and communication and there are records of primitive methods of counting including knotted strings or tallies. Numerical systems go as far back as the Egyptians and Ancient Chinese. They were used for everything from daily life (painting, weaving, recording time) to more difficult math that involved arithmetic, geometry and algebra for financial considerations such as taxation, trading, construction and time. On the subject of time, this was often based on astronomy as well. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians were adept at employing arithmetic and it is actually thought that the pyramids were more than the tombs of ancient kings long dead; the pyramids were also the initial computers. It was said the parameters and alignment of the pyramids assisted the ancients in conducting difficult calculations much like how we might use a log table before the widespread use of calculators. But where did the actual academic study of arithmetic begin? Math as we know it with geometry, vectors, differentiation, integration, mechanics, sequences, trigonometry, proability, binomials, estimation, hypothesis testing, geometric and exponential distributions and hyperbolic functions (to name a few off the top of my head) began in basic Greece as far back between 600 BC to 300 BC. From it's humble origins of tied knots, mathematics has been stretched into science and has been of great benefit to both fields of study. In fact, it is said that he who does not know mathematics cannot fully comprehend the beauty of nature. I would go so far as to say that there is no truth without arithmetic. Anything without a number is merely an idea. What we judge qualitative measurements are really quantitative ones that have exceeded a fixed threshold after which we bestow a fixed label. For example, when we say a drug works, what we really mean is that 70% of people who were administered a fixed dosage of the drug over a specific period of time experienced perhaps 90% reduction in the severity of their symptoms. Our threshold of saying that "a drug works" is therefore, 70%. To give you an idea of how the world of mathematics has expanded in recent years, I shall conclude this article with a quote from the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society: "The number of papers and books included in the Mathematical Reviews database since 1940 (the initial year of operation of MR) is now more than 1.9 million, and more than 75,000 items are added to the database per year. The overwhelming majority of works in this ocean contain new mathematical theorems and their proofs" - Mikhail B. Sevryuk,