Filling the Void

So after the trip to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, we moved on the bountiful empire of China.  Of course, the first thing I thought of was the greatest wall ever built. The number of people who died building the wall is unimaginable; they must have kept track of it using math.

Anyway, it was the making of the wall that required values in numbers. No one could engineer properly without representing how long, wide, or high the wall must be. Also, they could not ignore the fact that they needed angles. During these times, they already had a number system, and it was around a thousand years before the West thought of it. Imagine that, we totally beat them. They had symbols that stood for place value, but they still didn't have the concept of a zero. Sure, they knew that there exists a zero, but it has no figure and is not recognized as a number yet.

For them, numbers held cosmic significance, like how the number four is bad luck and number eight is a lucky number. They even started studying peculiar patterns, like the magic square. This 3x3 square, when the numbers are added up diagonally, horizontally or vertically, would result to one number: 15. They tried increasing the number of the squares in the magic square, but there always needs to be a middle box, meaning you can only have 3x3, 5x5, 7x7 and so on.

Another magical thought was how they used numbers to keep track of the emperor’s nights with 121 women. I really do not know why they have such a law and everything… maybe that’s why China’s so populated right now. Anyway, they actually formed a geometric sequence that multiplied by 3’s.

A Chinese man named Qin Jiushao was curious about the structure of a certain building. Due to his curiosity, he was able to make the first cubic equation, but he did not succeed in finding the exact volume of the building.

After travelling around in ancient China, we moved westward to India. I still remember the train scene with their numbers placed on the window. My first reaction to it was: wow those look very familiar… And then I realized that the number we are using now is the Hindu-Arabic system, meaning half of it came from them.

They believed the in the existence of non-existence, which they call the void. This is also the main reason why they believe in a zero. They got the idea by placing stones on sand. Once they took away the stones, what remains is a void or hole, which had a zero or O shape. Ta-da, zero is born.

They were also able to come up with the concept of negative numbers, and they got this idea from debts. It’s really smart though, maybe the concept of debts came from them too. Anyway, they found out that if you divide a number by 0, the result will be a very large number that cannot be written hence it only exists as a thought in many minds: infinity. Nobody can see it but it exists. This is probably what gave rise to limits.

The value of pi was estimated by the Indians too. Well, I’m not quite sure if they really did it with a boat but I know that they subtracted 4/odd numbers fractions from 4 a lot of times till they got a satisfactory answer.

When the Islamic empire came to rise, they used math for making patterns, as seen in their House of Wisdom. They also improved the number system of the Hindus, and used it since it was the simplest and most efficient.

What I remember when we moved from Persia to Italy was the leaning tower of Pisa with tons of rabbits in it. Turns out, we were discussing another type of sequence: the Fibonacci sequence. In Italy, a man called Fibonacci discovered a peculiar pattern of numbers. It starts with a 1, then another 1, and when you add the current number with the previous one, you end up with the next number in the series: two. Just continue doing this, and voila, you have a Fibonacci sequence! It’s called nature’s sequence to, for even snail shells and tree branching follow this.

Math really evolved at this point. I mean, I knew it began with hieroglyphs pictures, but then the Hindu-Arabic number system came to life, making math propel further to development.

It’s kind of funny how a lot of old people have tried so hard to find equations, numbers, patterns and theories in math while the students of our generation keep complaining about it and take it for granted. I don’t think I will be able to hate math (as much as I do now) as long as I think of the people who strived hard to contribute to the development of the science of patterns.