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
HISTORY OF NUMBERS Thales of Miletus below reportedly used math to figure out the height of Giza’s Great Pyramid opposite multiplication division fractions and algebra have been found on those tablets One of the ancient tablets even looked like graded math homework Scientists have an understanding of what the ancient Egyptians knew about math from the Rhind Moscow and Berlin papyruses which date from the 1800s to the 1600s b c The Rhind papyrus included instructions on how to do geometry On the Moscow pa pyrus were math word problems and how to solve them The Berlin papyrus showed the Egyptians doing algebraic equations While some ancient civilizations left behind evidence of what they understood about math others such as many native North American tribes left no trace We do not know what math they understood and applied to build their structures some of which still survive today In other ancient societies such as early China math was taught by spoken word The Chou Pei Suan Ching or The Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon and the Circular Paths of Heaven is the earliest known Chinese mathemati cal text and dates to approximately 200 b c Some of the mathematical findings show Chinese math as being very different compared with the rest of the world from around the same time This has led many scientists to believe Chinese math developed independently from math elsewhere The ancient civilization of the Mycenaeans circa 1900 1100 b c is considered the start of Greek culture in what is now modern mainland Greece and a group of islands The roots of the scientific method used today by scientists began with Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus 620 526 b c By the 300s b c Greek mathematicians were spread across the empire into the Middle East and northern Africa 9
