Mathematics: The Old Millenium

Math is important and fundamental to our lives. We apply math in our life.  Other people may hate math however we apply mathematics as a universal language. What is the importance of math in our everyday living? Even simple things such as reading the time on a watch, rounding dates on a calendar, getting scores in an exam, scoring games, and paying bills comes to play a role. We do simple calculation on the back of our minds and analyzing patterns to figure out generalization of things. But how did math begin? The symbols, idea of creation to solve problems, and how to make sense of our world, are the roots of mathematics.

The movie entitled ‘The Story of Math’ can be summarized as the history of mathematics. It gave evidence and trace of the origin and discoveries of math.  It showed how the world’s early civilizations discovered math and on how the early mathematicians derived with equations, theorems, identities and axioms. Different countries had various ways of deriving computations and quantifying things around them.

In the first installation of the movie, we had walk through the early years of mathematics; visiting Egypt, Greece and Babylonia. The early civilizations in the world, has the need to count on measurements. In Egypt, people observed patterns of seasons and the flooding of the Nile River. They also count days and years through the rising and setting of the sun, thus this was further developed into calendar. Their means of living was agriculture; hence they encounter practical problems which led them to measure land areas using rope. The Egyptians derived decimal systems by using fingers on the hands. They derived fractions by symbolizing it to the eye of a horse. And they have given the exact value of Pi. Egyptian’s greatest contribution to mathematics is the pyramids. Egyptian mathematics is through hieroglyphs or symbols. In Babylon, people tell the time today through base 60 number system; there are 60 seconds in a minute, and there are 60 minutes in one hour. They discovered quadratic equation as an aid to solve the measurement of lands.  In Greece, the greatest and well-known mathematicians came from. Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid, and Archimedes are some of those who had big contributions to the discovery of mathematics. Greeks discovered power of proof, axioms and theories.

After I had watched the documentary, I realized that without the discovery of math every people would be so dumb, not knowing the time or what day is it, do not know how to count and solve problems. One thing that I was really glad of was knowing how lucky we were in this generation that we don’t need to go through a life that you don’t know ways of doing things and figuring things out. I am admired with the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks, how dividing breads led them to the idea of fractions, abacus as a way to compute and shell as a currency. I am thankful that they have already given values to constants and created equations that made our arithmetic and algebra easier.

“The essence of mathematics is not to make things complicated but to make complicated things simple” – S. Gudder . Indeed, mathematics was discovered to subject arising problems and give solutions to them. In mathematics everything has right answers following a valid reasoning or proof and network of concepts and facts or a theory.  Nowadays, we now know how to address problems because there were already patterns from pre-existing discoveries of them. We know that there are formulas to quantify a given equation. And that is what we should really be glad for those who discovered mathematics.