From Astonished Men to Irrational Numbers

I already know that mathematics has a long and complicated history. Sometimes, I would deem it boring because, who wants to know more about old and ancient numbers anyway? They’re still the same numbers that make my head ache. I was looking forward to Math 1 because I had this good feeling that it would spike up my interest in numbers and solving problems with them.

And it did. I mean, on the first day of proper class, we viewed a film. It was a great technique though, because all students love a good film. Unfortunately, it was about numbers, but I gave it a chance because I have never seen a documentary about the history of math before.

It all started with the Egyptians. It was pretty obvious though, I mean, because of the pyramids they constructed having such a shape that was yet to have a name. What really struck me was how they thought of inventing numbers. They must have some kind of imagination to come up with figures to help them in their everyday lives. I tried imagining myself as a person during the early times, and there is a slim possibility of me imagining numbers. It is true indeed, that if you are in need of something, you try to find ways to invent that certain something. And voila, math was born. They first made numbers come into existence by using figures called hieroglyphs like astonished men and flowers, which helped them count the number of crops they have sold. They usually use the rise and fall of the Nile to track the year, and lunar phases to track the month. Of course, they didn’t stop in just using numbers for counting. They used body parts, like their arms, to measure certain quantities like length and weight. Numbers were still used to measure. It was probably also the start of basic geometry, because they really needed to analyze and make the great pyramids.

Math developed more quickly in Mesopotamia compared to Egypt. Here, the Babylonians invented angle measurement and used 60 as a basis of a lot of things, especially time. This is mainly because the number 60 can be divided by 10, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2. The one thing that intrigued me is how they use tablets as exercise sheets. It was so cool and fascinating, the way they made perfectly shaped triangles engraved into the clay tablets. Someday, I would want to solve problems on a tablet. The Babylonians even looked into the possibility of a number that signifies nothing, or the number 0. They were really creative and new ideas sprung from here and there. They even invented the irrational number, the ever-famous pi, by calculating the perimeter of a hexagon that is within a circle. They already thought of irrational numbers that early. Pi is very important in getting the area of a circle, a formula I could never forget.

I have been very interested in the Greeks because of their famous legends and mythology, but that is not the only concept they have contributed to the modern world. Pythagoras, an awesome Greek guy, was able to find out that in a triangle with one right angle, the square of the 2 smaller sized sides is equal to the square of the biggest size. It was proved to, by using figures. And by square, I literally meant squares as sides of a right triangle. Math is a bit advanced around this time, and a lot of Greek people started making math a bit modern, and even made certain rules and theorems. Even the Greek philosopher Plato was interested in developing math. Around this time, irrational numbers were hard to follow, and other Greek mathematicians were devoted on solving the mystery of irrationality. Archimedes, who is an inventor and a famous Greek mathematician, prospered around this time and developed a lot of new mathematical concepts, like the relationship between a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder. The famous “Eureka” was probably said around the times of his new discoveries.

All in all, I found the film to be quite enjoyable, but sometimes I notice that it may be a bit too fast paced at times. Luckily, I can still keep up with the narrator. It is nice to think that the very different civilizations have been able to create one of the most important (and frankly quite scary) concepts of today: mathematics. Without it, there would be no math, of course, but importantly I think technology and ways of problem solving would be different and tiresome. The internet may have not been invented without math, and know that I am aware of that I am very thankful that math exists. Math may not be so bad, after all.