Review on The Story of Maths part 2 “The Genius of East”

                In the second part of The Story of Maths “The Genius of the East” Professor Sautoy traveled to the East where mathematics significantly progressed while mathematics in Europe stagnated during the Dark Ages.

                Sautoy visited first the imperial China where he discovers that the Chinese were the first to use decimal place in a number system. They also had an early version of Sudoku which is called the magic square. The Chinese were so obsessed with patterns that they even associate mathematics on how the Emperor manage to sleep with the princess down to his slaves.

                In India a remarkable development was discovered. They invented the zero. The number whose been ignored by other societies leaving it as a blank but the Indians considered it as significant part of the numbers. Indian mathematicians established observatories where they measure the approximate distance of sun and moon to the earth using the concept of trigonometry. They also had the concept of infinity, negative numbers, circumference and diameter of a circle and the quotient of circumference over the diameter which is the pi.

                In the Middle East, Arabs acquired ancient mathematical texts from different societies they have invaded. Arab mathematicians studied these readings and developed it. They came up and introduced algebra and solutions to cubic equations. They are also known for creating the Hindu-Arabic numerals that we use now. They developed it from the numbers used by the Indians.

                After watching this documentary I imagined that what if we were born back before these mathematical developments were discovered, we would count and use numbers in base 8. We were so lucky that these discoveries were already here. If it weren't for these discoveries our cellphones would not work, skyscrapers would not stand even bridges would have collapsed because all of these simple things that we see every day cannot work and exist without mathematics.