Ancient Mathematical History
Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, mathematicians seek to understand the nature of order and consistency. It has gotten more idealized and mathematically precise as its practitioners have prioritized such abstract thinking and computation. Mathematical tools have been indispensable to the quantitative branches of science and industry since the 17th century, and this trend has recently moved to the biological sciences. If you’re struggling with division in math, their site is where you want to be.
Numerous civilizations have progressed well beyond counting in mathematics due to the demands of trade, agriculture, and other applied fields. The most progress has been made in this field by civilizations that have both the technology to support such endeavors and the leisure time to ponder and expand upon the work of previous mathematicians.
Axioms and the theorems that follow from them are the basis of all of mathematics, including Euclidean geometry. Many philosophical and logical concerns in mathematics revolve upon determining whether or not a system is complete and consistent in light of its axioms. Please refer to Mathematics, Core Concepts for further details.
This article offers a contextualization of mathematics, beginning with its prehistorical beginnings and continuing all the way up to the present day. Most of the main advancements in mathematics from the 15th century to the late 20th century took place in Europe and North America, and this is an irrefutable historical truth that can’t be refuted, especially given the exponential expansion of science from the 15th century CE. Consequently, the events that transpired in Europe after 1500 account for the bulk of the article’s focus.
This is not to say, however, that events occurring elsewhere in the globe have been irrelevant. Understanding the mathematical development in Europe requires understanding the mathematical development in Mesopotamia and Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Islamic civilisation from the 9th to the 15th century. Greek and Islamic civilizations, both of which made significant direct contributions to subsequent developments, are examined first in this article.
India’s contributions to contemporary mathematics may be traced back to the early Islamic mathematical accomplishments that influenced those of Europeans. A separate article should be written on the possibility that South Asia is where modern mathematics and the decimal place-value numeral system originated. The distinctive growth of mathematics in East Asian countries including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam is discussed in the article East Asian mathematics.
Codifications of mathematics from antiquity
Understanding the development of mathematics requires some background knowledge. Surviving scribe-written records are used to reconstruct the development of mathematics in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. There is no doubt whether Egyptian mathematics was primarily theoretical or applied, notwithstanding the paucity of surviving artefacts. In contrast, many clay tablets attest to the ancient Mesopotamians’ mathematical prowess, and their work is of much superior quality than that of the Egyptians at the period. The tablets show that the Mesopotamians knew quite a bit about mathematics, but they don’t prove that this information was organised in any way. However, although this image of Mesopotamian mathematics seems to be sound at the moment, new data about the history of Mesopotamian mathematics or its impact on Greek mathematics may emerge in the future.
Before Alexander the Great, only paraphrases of Greek mathematical works exist; even after Alexander, the earliest copies of Euclid’s Elements are found in Byzantine manuscripts from the 10th century CE. Comparatively, the situation with Egyptian and Babylonian writings is quite different from this one. Historians tend to agree on the broad strokes of Greek mathematics, but often disagree on the finer points. Numerous mathematical developments may be traced back to these pioneers, including the axiomatic approach, the pre-Euclidean theory of ratios, and the discovery of conic sections.
Many questions remain unresolved about the relationship between early Islamic mathematics and the mathematics of Greece and India due to the destruction or survival only in Latin translations of significant treatises from the early period of Islamic mathematics. It is also difficult to describe with certainty what was unique in European mathematics from the 11th to the 15th century since the quantity of knowledge surviving from subsequent centuries is so great in contrast to that which has been investigated.
Now that getting manuscripts is less of a hassle because to modern printing techniques, historians of mathematics may devote more time to editing the mathematicians’ personal letters and other unpublished works. Due to the exponential development of mathematics, it is only during the eighteenth century that historians can dig into the lives of the most influential persons in history. Looking at things from a more contemporary vantage point raises the same issue of perspective. Closer to a certain time period, mathematical developments seem more innovative, as is the case in any other human endeavour. This paper will thus not include an evaluation of the most current studies.
