Another Blast from the Past

For the second instalment of The Story of Maths, Oxford Professor Marcus du Sautoy sailed the East to fathom its mathematical upsurge while the West experienced a staggering of its own.

To start the trek, du Sautoy first wandered in China where he discovered that ancient Chinese first used the decimal place number system long before than we use it today. Chinese people counted in base ten, just like people in Egypt. But the Chinese system was more efficient. Calculations were performed using rods made of bamboo. The position of the rods indicates the decimal place value and the 0 digit was represented using a space. But they never stopped there, in fact the making of the Great Wall of China involved many techniques in computations and as well as engineering.  Hence, the ancient Chinese mathematics produced many solutions for arithmetic, advanced algebra and even physics that somehow made them forward compared to the Western world.

In India, he learned that our modern number system today was contributed by the Indian mathematicians and that their biggest invention to the world would be the use of zero as a placeholder. Around the same time, they worked on the concept of infinities and negative numbers, which proved there are no impossibilities beyond nothingness. With that, they have been able to use variables such as x and y to represent unknowns and discovered trigonometry where right triangles flourished. They developed sine functions and most of all figured out the exact value of pi.

The Islamic mathematics focused most of its work on the development on some of the works of its neighboring civilizations. The Hindu-Arabic number system for example, was polished and introduced to the world and later accepted by Europe. During this time, the creation of abstract mathematical language spawned across Middle East which was influenced by the fusion of Greek and Indian mathematical works. Soon enough, the mathematical progress of the East reached new heights and was spread to Europe such as Italy through mathematicians like Leonardo Fibonacci, which created the Fibonacci sequence.

Indeed, the birth of Mathematics involved different time and civilizations. But one thing is for sure, it may change as time goes by but it always speaks the same language. It may be improved but the concept is still there. In general, Mathematics is what the world speaks and will always do. The fruit of both East and West civilizations fused as one to allow communication throughout the world.