Starting With Letter "M"

The complexity of our world is never easy to understand. It is embedded with a lot of history that until now remains a mystery. Relationship of every thing to the world has something to do with a certain discipline, a discipline above all others in the world which helped people from the past until the present time. Mathematics is the discipline above all these complexities. The growth of this sophisticated subject led the earliest great mathematicians to manage the needs of the earliest civilizations of Egypt, Babylon and Greece.

            Egyptians’ calendar was partly based on the river Nile. When the river floods they count how many days were in between the two flooding. Egyptians found their ways of counting and measuring through body parts. A palm is equal to the width of the hand and a cubit is the arm length from elbow to fingertips. Their decimal system was aided by their ten fingers. The sign of one is a stroke, ten was a heelbone, a coil of rope was for a hundred and lotus plant for a thousand. These people have recorded their mathematical discoveries on sheets which they call papyrus but these secrets were gone when these sheets eventually decayed, except for one. In this surviving document, they found an Egyptian’s delicate way of multiplying and dividing. Fractions were not making any trouble at that early time. The Egyptians had developed notations to record this kind of numbers.  The mystical Eye of Horus was the first representation of these fractions. The Egyptians were the ones who formulate the area of a circle and they were the first to calculate the accurate value of pi. The famous pyramids of Egypt are also associated with mathematics. These pyramids are connected to the golden ratio. The golden ratio is also used by architects, artists and designers to impose mathematical ideas on their works to achieve perfection. On a retrieved papyrus, the formula for pyramid was written and this is where Calculus had its first take off.

            Babylonians have become masters of numbers in order to expand their empire. Unlike the Egyptians, Babylonians kept their records on clay tablets. These people have created their number system based on their ten fingers just like the Egyptians, but their way of counting made them different. Babylonians use twelve knuckles of one hand and five fingers of the other hand to be able to multiply twelve by five. The number sixty was of great importance to the Babylonians. It is the primary basis of doing arithmetic. The base sixty is the origin of our sixty seconds in a minute and our sixty minutes in an hour. Babylonians’ recorded list of lunar eclipses was made possible by mathematics. It was in this civilization where the birth of zero occurred. Babylonians have made representation for this place holder to appear in the mathematical universe. At that time, Babylonians were in need of solving land problems, and it was in this civilization where quadratic equation was used, such a great legacy of the Babylonians. These people’s interest with numbers made mathematics a part of their leisure time. Their own version of the game Backgammon made them calculate easily. The Plimpton 322, an ancient tablet of the Babylonians, depicts the principle of right angle triangles and was believed that they had first known it, not the Greeks.

            Greeks’ passion to mathematics can be seen in their structures depicting geometric perfection. In this civilization, they have used a deductive system in order to prove theorems. Pythagoras, a legendary figure in Greece, was the man to transform mathematics from the ideas of accounting to analytic. Pythagoras’ Theorem states that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other side. Pythagoras was also the one who discovered the harmonic series. He concluded that the intervals between harmonious musical notes were always represented as whole number ratios. Accompanied with his fame was the discovery of the irrational numbers that somehow did not fit to the Pythagorean world view. One of mathematics’ most important patrons was Plato, the founder of the institution “The Academy”. Plato’s fascination with geometry can be associated with the sign above “The Academy”: let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Plato is the author of the Platonic solids implementing that the universe can be crystallized into five regular symmetrical shapes. Euclid, the chronicler of math, is the author of the most important textbook of all time which was called “The Elements”. Indicated in here were the formulas for calculating volumes of cones and cylinders, proofs about geometric series, perfect numbers and primes. Archimedes which was treated as a mathematical visionary was the one to produce formulas to calculate the areas of regular shapes. Pi, the most important number in mathematics was founded by Archimedes through estimating the area of the circle. He soared in the field of calculating volume of solid objects and was the one to calculate the volume of the sphere. Not only males pioneered the early mathematics. Hypatia, a brilliant female teacher and theorist kept the legacy of the Greeks after it was ruined by the Romans.

            As a student, all of these contributions to mathematics are very useful. In fact, other subjects like chemistry and physics may not be in existence today if numbers where neglected back in those days. Inventions which make our present life easier would not be taken into consideration by our brilliant inventors in the absence of math. In connection to this, there may be no scientists and inventors if those great mathematicians just remained silent of what they knew. Through the help of math, things which seem to be impossible are now taking the spotlight, telling the people that they really do exist. Ancient mathematicians have truly changed the course of man’s development. The world’s economy or wealth which is one way to determine progress would not be interpreted without the use of numbers. Without these great mathematicians, our world would be in great trouble. All will be ignorant and afraid to count. Thanks to them we are enjoying the world of numbers with lots of fun and excitement.