Taking Math on Its First Step: The Civilizations as Its Parents

           Seeing a pack of speakers prepared as we walked inside our classroom, it struck to me that this will be an exciting meeting because we’ll be seeing a movie! However, when Ma’am warned us that this will be the first “boring” movie we’ll be seeing, I’ve never given my hopes up. Guess I am right!

When we were introduced on the first part of the series of the documentary The Story of Maths, I was really fascinated by it. Tracing back to ancient civilizations namely Egypt, Babylonia and Greece, the fashion of Mathematics has grown from simple counting to measuring and developing equations with only one goal: to find a solution to a problem.

In every civilization, I found a unique characteristic on how they developed their math. The Egyptians first used counting numbers for determining the number of days when the flooding days or the lunar times start. Also the perfectness of their pyramids, not only in terms of the shape, but on the inner concept of slicing it will create a perfect square, are representations on how the Egyptians can be called as “ancient geniuses” of that time.

The Babylonians’ concept of 60 in terms of the basis of time in minutes and seconds are quite fascinating, and I have appreciated the uniqueness of this simple two digit number. I’ve always wondered where this concept came from, and it was from them.

The Greeks, which are known for its philosophers, also conceptualized the existence of irrational numbers. They have introduced the Pythagorean Theorem which is very useful in the current study of basic geometry. The magic of the numbers in any right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides, has intrigued me since I’ve encountered geometry way back then.

The complexity of life was much simpler way back these civilizations existed, yet it did not stopped them from risking the potential of using mathematics as gateway to the development of the world we’ve come to know. This characteristic common in these three civilizations has showed me that human beings cannot be stopped in learning and exploring various ways in solving any problem they may encounter alongside the consequences of progress through time.