The Indispensable Counting

         Last November 15, the Math 1 class section J (in which I also belong) watched a Mathematics documentary which lasted for about an hour. The host of the documentary was Marcus de Sautoy which also happened to be an English professor from University of Oxford. The Story of Maths was actually a series which consisted of five episodes: The Language of the Universe, The Genius of the East, The Frontiers of Space, and To Infinity and Beyond. As for the moment, I will just talk over the first episode-The Language of the Universe-since we have not watched the others yet.

           At the beginning, the host introduced how Mathematics played a vital role in our life. I remembered what Ms. Cielo Blasing said and I quote, “Mathematics evolved just like how we learned it.” Mathematics evolved as a form of need. Applied Mathematics sprang out before Pure Mathematics if we base it on history. The journey of de Sautoy started at the River of Nile. At 6000 BC, Egyptians that lived near the River of Nile took into account the patterns of seasons for them to know (as far as estimation would offer) the day in which the river would overflow and cause flood. This was important because the Nile River is their source of water for their early irrigation system. Just by knowing the patterns was essential in the development of their economy. By then, Bureaucracy and Mathematics had a connection. They had the need to know how much tax to pay for the amount of land area they owned. They utilized their fingers for multiplying and dividing with the use of decimal system. The Egyptians where known for their staple food, the bread and cheese. Even before, fractions were used as way of dividing bread and cheese in equal parts. They had ideas about binary numbers and shapes. The market and trade made use of scales. The evidences of this were from the Rhind Papyrus.

            His journey brought him to the City of Babylon in which he discovered that Babylonians used the base 60 number system. Due to the Babylonians and their number system, we have our sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour. The teachers at their time taught and wrote spaces which meant zero or nothing. There were evidences of this in the most famous Babylonian tablet. They had also used quadratic equations to measure land areas. Backgammon was also a popular game which started even before 330 BC. His journey moved on to Greece which is considered the home of ancient Greek mathematics. This was the cradle of known mathematicians like Pythagoras. He was branded by his discovery of the Pythagorean Theorem after observing musical instruments. He also discovered the irrational numbers. Another known philosopher in all fields is Plato, the teacher of Aristotle and the creator of The Academy. He had interest on the three-dimensional images of air, water, fire, and earth. Archimedes was another philosopher mentioned from the documentary which had almost got the exact number of pi while playing with spherical stones which I believe the ancestor of the Filipino game “Sungka”.

            Mathematics did evolve just how we learned it. We learned to count, to differentiate shapes, to add and subtract, to multiply and divide, and so on and so forth. Way before this lesson our minds were blocked with questions such as “Kinsa man ju’y nagimbento aning Math uy?” Which in fact it wasn’t a who, but a what.

Whendy Kristy Vee Rivera

2^nd year- BS Biology