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The earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. They developed a complex system of metrology from 3000 BC that was chiefly concerned with administrative/financial counting, such as grain allotments, workers, weights of silver, or even liquids, among other ...
1650 BC – Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, copy of a lost scroll from around 1850 BC, the scribe Ahmes presents one of the first known approximate values of π at 3.16, the first attempt at squaring the circle, earliest known use of a sort of cotangent, and knowledge of solving first order linear equations. The earliest recorded use of ...
The grain was the earliest unit of mass and is the smallest unit in the apothecary, avoirdupois, Tower, and troy systems. The early unit was a grain of wheat or barleycorn used to weigh the precious metals silver and gold. Larger units preserved in stone standards were developed that were used as both units of mass and of monetary currency.
Chinese mathematics made early contributions, including a place value system and the first use of negative numbers. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via ...
An interesting feature of ancient Egyptian mathematics is the use of unit fractions. [7] The Egyptians used some special notation for fractions such as 1 / 2 , 1 / 3 and 2 / 3 and in some texts for 3 / 4 , but other fractions were all written as unit fractions of the form 1 / n or sums of such unit ...
The earliest traces of Babylonian numerals also date back to this period. [8] Babylonian mathematics has been reconstructed from more than 400 clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. [9] Written in cuneiform, these tablets were inscribed whilst the clay was soft and then baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. Some of these appear to ...
c. 2800 BC — Indus Valley civilization on the Indian subcontinent, earliest use of decimal ratios in a uniform system of ancient weights and measures, the smallest unit of measurement used is 1.704 millimetres and the smallest unit of mass used is 28 grams. [citation needed]
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, first compiled in 179 AD, with added commentary in the 3rd century by Liu Hui Haidao Suanjing, Liu Hui, 3rd century. The first definitive work (or at least oldest existent) on geometry in China was the Mo Jing, the Mohist canon of the early philosopher Mozi (470–390 BC).