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The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past.Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales.
This is a timeline of pure and applied mathematics history.It is divided here into three stages, corresponding to stages in the development of mathematical notation: a "rhetorical" stage in which calculations are described purely by words, a "syncopated" stage in which quantities and common algebraic operations are beginning to be represented by symbolic abbreviations, and finally a "symbolic ...
There is no general consensus about the definition of mathematics or its epistemological status—that is, its place inside knowledge. A great many professional mathematicians take no interest in a definition of mathematics, or consider it undefinable. There is not even consensus on whether mathematics is an art or a science.
[8] [9] Islamic mathematics, in turn, developed and expanded the mathematics known to these civilizations. [10] Contemporaneous with but independent of these traditions were the mathematics developed by the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America, where the concept of zero was given a standard symbol in Maya numerals.
The independence of the mathematical objects is such that they are non physical and do not exist in space or time. Neither does their existence rely on thought or language. For this reason, mathematical proofs are discovered, not invented. The proof existed before its discovery, and merely became known to the one who discovered it. [13]
The ancient period introduced some of the ideas that led to integral calculus, but does not seem to have developed these ideas in a rigorous and systematic way. . Calculations of volumes and areas, one goal of integral calculus, can be found in the Egyptian Moscow papyrus (c. 1820 BC), but the formulas are only given for concrete numbers, some are only approximately true, and they are not ...
Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897) formalized and popularized the (ε, δ)-definition of limits, and discovered some pathological functions that seemed paradoxical at this time, such as continuous, nowhere-differentiable functions. Indeed, such functions contradict previous conceptions of a function as a rule for computation or a smooth graph.
Two abstract areas of modern mathematics are category theory and model theory. Bertrand Russell [95] once said, "Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say."