HIN K LIK E A T S T CIEN T IS WHAT IS THE REASON INTRODUCTION During World War II the Nazis sent cers about war tactics The Allies secret codes to their military offi such as Great Britain and the United States attempted to break those codes because lives and the fate of the world were at stake The Allies were up against the Germans Enigma machine which looked like a typewriter but could turn ordinary mes sages into an encrypted code Because no letter in the code was repeated normal codebreaking methods did not apply British mathematician Alan Turing was working furiously alongside other scien tists to break the Enigma codes In 1939 he helped design a decryption machine that was used in cracking the settings behind the Enigma The Allies could now break Nazi codes in 20 minutes Reason is the ability of the mind to make sense of what is going on through logic Mathematicians such as Turing look for patterns They think about all the different ways to arrive at an answer Computer science is a relatively new field with roots in the mathematical calcula tions of the 1800s By applying math computer scientists develop methods of computing or processing information Mathematicians and computer scientists use their math and science knowledge to investigate and their reason to solve problems in a logical way Whether it is coming up with a code to protect a bank account or calculating a submarine’s safe journey to the bottom of the ocean and back decision-making systems all rely on the ability to reason 5
HIN K LIK T E A S CIEN T IST WHAT IS THE REASON CHAPTER 1 HISTORy OF NUmBERS A 37,000-yeAr-old BABooN BoNe WITh 27 eTcheS Scientists think it is one of the oldest examples across it was found in Swaziland in the 1970s of people doing math Just like the other sciences math ematics came about because of the needs of people Primitive or early people did not have much need for math beyond the ability to count things however as societies became more complex and looked to build temples accumulate wealth and explore or conquer they required mathematicians to advance math beyond simple counting New mathematical methods were needed to solve increasingly complicated problems computations have been discovered on artifacts from many different cultures across the globe our knowledge of the early Babylonians and Sumerians math comes from clay tablets dating from more than 3,000 years ago The early mathematicians wrote on tablets while the clay The Babylonian math tablets used the cuneiform writing system was still moist and then baked them in the sun’s heat operations such as 7
