Prehistoric mathematics
The origins of mathematical thought lie in the concepts of number,
magnitude, and form.[11] Modern studies of animal cognition have shown
that these concepts are not unique to humans. Such concepts would have
been part of everyday life in hunter-gatherer societies. The idea of the
"number" concept evolving gradually over time is supported by the
existence of languages which preserve the distinction between "one",
"two", and "many", but not of numbers larger than two.[11]
The
oldest known possibly mathematical object is the Lebombo bone,
discovered in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland and dated to
approximately 35,000 BC.[12] It consists of 29 distinct notches cut into
a baboon's fibula.[13] Also prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa
and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old,[14] suggest early
attempts to quantify time.[15]
The Ishango bone, found near
the headwaters of the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be as much as
20,000 years old and consists of a series of tally marks carved in
three columns running the length of the bone. Common interpretations are
that the Ishango bone shows either the earliest known demonstration of
sequences of prime numbers[13] or a six month lunar calendar.[16] In the
book How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years, Peter Rudman
argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only
have come about after the concept of division, which he dates to after
10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about
500 BC. He also writes that "no attempt has been made to explain why a
tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers
between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of
10."[17]
Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC
pictorially represented geometric designs. It has been claimed that
megalithic monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd
millennium BC, incorporate geometric ideas such as circles, ellipses,
and Pythagorean triples in their design.[18]
All of the above
are disputed however, and the currently oldest undisputed mathematical
usage is in Babylonian and dynastic Egyptian sources. Thus it took human
beings at least 45,000 years from the attainment of behavioral
modernity and language (generally thought to be a long time before that)
to develop mathematics as such.
[edit] Babylonian mathematics
Main article: Babylonian mathematics
See also: Plimpton 322
The
Babylonian mathematical tablet Plimpton 322, dated to 1800 BC.
Babylonian mathematics refers to any mathematics of the people of
Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the days of the early Sumerians through
the Hellenistic period almost to the dawn of Christianity.[19] It is
named Babylonian mathematics due to the central role of Babylon as a
place of study. Later under the Arab Empire, Mesopotamia, especially
Baghdad, once again became an important center of study for Islamic
mathematics
by: vanitha perumal
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