Timey-Wimey, Tardis of Mathematics

How Mathematics travelled in time from East to West. If the first movie talked about the origin of Mathematics, this one talked about how Math grew and spread all over the world from that origin.

According to Professor Marcus Du Sautoy, Mathematics really started from the East and then spread all over the West. From China, all the way to India and then to Italy. He also showed how the ancient people wrote numbers and how those numbers evolved as time went by until they were able to arrive with our current number system.

First stop was China. China had the concept of Mathematics as early as those times they built the Great Wall of China. One of the biggest contributions of China in the field of Mathematics is the number theory. This theory gave way to a lot of Mathematical advances that we now have such as cryptography.

India is one of the countries that contributed a lot to the field from Mathematics. They were the ones who introduced zero as a representation of nothingness and coined the concept of negative numbers. But the most important thing that they contributed was the Hindu-Arabic Numerals. This number system is the gateway that allowed us, human beings, to evolve in the field of Mathematics.

One country from the west that was tackled by Professor Du Sautoy was Italy. Italy made Mathematics to be known as the science of patterns. Fibonacci number is said to be present in all patterns we observe in our everyday lives.

All of the contributions from the east to the west opened up opportunities for us to evolve and develop. From those simple patterns before to the calculus we have today. Mathematics indeed evolved the same as man did. Our ancestors are one of the biggest factors why we have this kind of Mathematics today, so, we should be thankful to them, or maybe not. After all, they also gave us headaches, right?

One thing that I love about the movie was the fact that Mathematics really originated from Asia. It is indeed something to be proud of. 

The movie was like my virtual tardis (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) of Mathematics. (sa makarelate lang J). It allowed us to see the some parts of the timeline of Mathematics and helped us know Math better.

Watching the movie was like travelling in time and space just to know how Mathematics spread all over the world. All in all, the time travel was cool, the movie fed us a lot ideas that we might find useful when time comes.