W hen you think about mathematics you probably think about a class at school where you do calculations and answer word problems But have you ever thought about math being all around you It’s in every shape and pattern you see It’s in every song you hear It’s in every game you play and any puzzle you solve The first math ematicians realized this and they looked for ways to prove it to show how order and reason could explain much about life as they knew it Sometimes this was easy to do But other times people just didn’t get it Even some of the most intelligent people in history have struggled with math Albert Einstein once wrote to a child Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics I can assure you mine are still greater So how can you use whatever you know about math in everyday life When you count the number of minutes your teacher takes to tell you about a homework assignment add up the friends you’ve invited to your house after school or divide the tasks in a group project you are using math In such cases you are using a type of math known as arithmetic This is the oldest branch of mathemat ics and it is all about numbers and quantities How much math can you make work using arithmetic 5
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS MADE THEIR HOME ALONG THE NILE RIVER OPPOSITE 6
BASICS OF BASE-10 WHEN DID YOU START using math It was probably when you learned to count You started by counting to 10 and then to 100 Next you learned how to write numbers That is the same process people have used for thou sands of years They began by counting everyday objects and then wrote numbers to share their counts with others One of the most basic systems for writing numbers was the tally system In this system a tally mark represents the number one It is easy to understand at first but can quickly become difficult to follow as larger numbers require many tallies Therefore it eventually became necessary to find ways to shorten nu meric representations One of the earliest civilizations to have a written language the Egyptians wrote their numbers just like they wrote everything else with pictures called hieroglyphs Some of the pictures make sense to us like using a tally for the num ber one Others seem a little strange such as the astonished man that represents 1,000,000 In hieroglyphs the number 1,126 would be written like this 7
