Compass Points opposite West

As you can remember, the first episode of The Story of Maths, The Language of the Universe, tackled on how need turned into math. Even though the progress of mathematics in Europe was idled due to the fallout in ancient Greece, the development of math continued on the East. The journey of Marcus du Sautoy continued to China. The very famous and considered one of the greatest wonders of the world, The Great Wall of China, was built to protect the country’s northern border in the 3^rd century BC. This is one of the examples of the applications of math. Sautoy explains that without touches of math, the Great Wall that is considered as a world heritage site by UNESCO would not be enjoyed until now. Chinese already knew how to use the decimal place value system and used the remainder theorem. Qin Jiushao was the proponent of Magic Square. A magic square is square containing rows and columns of numbers arranged in such a way that each horizontal, vertical, and diagonal line has the same sum.

The ideas they used and practice during their time remains factual up-to-date. An example of this is cryptography, an application of the Number Theorem. Cryptography is the basic concept behind the transmission of information through the internet. There are two main processes: encrypting and decrypting. Another country from the East was visited by du Sautoy, India. India established zero as a number itself. In China, zero did not matter because it is not required in their system of numbers but in India it was a one serious deal. The film mentioned a lot of contributors to the number zero. Also, the value of pi which we still use today was discovered by an Indian. Through discovering the value of it, there was also the concept of negative numbers and the concept of infinity. All the concepts and ideas practiced by the Indians were described by du Sautoy as Indian mathematicians’ trigonometry.

Du Sautoy also visited Persia. He considers Middle East as the invention of the new language of Algebra and the evolution of solutions to cubic equations. He also studied how the knowledge of the East spread out to the West with the help of mathematicians like Leonardo Fibonacci. When we studied about the history of Math, the familiar people that gave contributions were the ones from the West. It’s great that this film made a stand that the East also were benefactors of Math.

Whendy Kristy Vee Rivera

2^nd year BS Biology