History of Mathematics in the Academic World

Mathematicians employ methods like counting, measuring, and describing to examine order and consistency. Due to a rising priority on rational thought and precise computation, it has grown increasingly idealised and abstracted over time. Since the 17th century, mathematics has played an increasingly essential supporting role in the quantitative parts of the physical sciences and technology, a function that has recently expanded to include the biological sciences. If you’re having trouble dividing numbers, their website is a great resource. Example: What are easy steps to divide 1300 by 24? Many civilizations have advanced much beyond simple counting in their mathematical understanding due to the demands of manufacturing, agriculture, and other practical industries. Greatest progress has been made in civilizations that are both technologically advanced enough to promote such pursuits and culturally flexible enough to promote self-reflection and the building upon the work of earlier mathematicians.
Not even Euclidean geometry can be separated from its foundational axioms and the theorems that follow from them. Many philosophical and logical problems about mathematics centre on the investigation of a mathematical system for completeness and consistency in light of its axioms. Check out Mathematics, Basic Concepts if you want to learn more about this subject.
Discover how mathematics has evolved from ancient times to the current day with insight from this article’s historical perspective. The exponential expansion of scientific knowledge since the 15th century CE has been largely responsible for the progress made in mathematics, and it is a historical fact that most of the new discoveries in mathematics have occurred in Europe and North America from the 15th century until the late 20th century. Because of this, the article focuses mostly on European history after 1500.
Not that events in other regions of the world haven’t mattered; far from it. The development of mathematics in Europe from the ninth to fifteenth centuries needs familiarity with developments in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, classical Greece, and Islamic civilisation. Early on, we’ll examine the ways in which the Greek and Islamic cultures—two of the most consequential in later history—influenced one another.
India’s contributions to mathematics were significant because of the impact that country’s earlier accomplishments had on the development of Islamic mathematics. That mathematics and the present decimal place-value numeral system may have originated in South Asia is a fascinating enough idea to need its own article. This article explores the distinctive mathematical progress made in East Asian countries including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Primitive mathematical texts
To fully grasp mathematics, one must be familiar with its background. Surviving scribe-written manuscripts are the backbone upon which the history of mathematics in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt rests. Few artefacts from ancient Egyptian mathematics have survived, but what we have is very uniform, leaving little room for debate on whether the subject was more theoretical or practical. However, the mathematical accomplishments of the ancient Mesopotamians, as documented on a number of clay tablets, were considerably better to anything the Egyptians had done at the time. Although the tablets make it seem as though the Mesopotamians possessed a sophisticated grasp of mathematics, there is few indication that this knowledge was systematically organised. However, fresh evidence about the roots of Mesopotamian mathematics and its effect on Greek mathematics may emerge in the future, so this image should be taken with a grain of salt for the time being.
Byzantine manuscripts from the 10th century CE include the first known copy of Euclid’s Elements, which suggests that all Greek mathematical literature prior to Alexander the Great consists of fragmentary paraphrases. This is in stark contrast to the state of Egyptian and Babylonian writings. Historians may agree on the broad strokes of Greek mathematics, but they may not necessarily agree on the finer points. As examples, we may look to the axiomatic approach, the pre-Euclidean theory of ratios, and the discovery of conic sections.
There are still many open questions about the relationship between early Islamic mathematics and the mathematics of Greece and India since many significant treatises from the early period of Islamic mathematics have been lost or survived only in Latin translations. It is difficult to describe what was distinctive about European mathematics between the 11th and 15th centuries since the amount of knowledge that has survived from subsequent ages is so vast in contrast with that which has been investigated.
Thanks to advances in printing technology, collecting manuscripts is now more simpler, giving math historians more time to focus on editing the mathematicians’ private letters and unpublished works. Unfortunately, the exponential development of mathematics means that historians can only begin to probe the most important persons in any depth beginning in the nineteenth century. The issue of perspective becomes even more noticeable when talking about relatively recent historical eras in compared to the current day. The longer time passes, the more inventive the mathematical tendencies appear to be. This is true for all areas of human endeavour. This is why the article doesn’t try to summarise the newest findings.