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c. 20,000 BC — Nile Valley, Ishango Bone: suggested, though disputed, as the earliest reference to prime numbers as also a common number. [1] c. 3400 BC — the Sumerians invent the first so-known numeral system, [dubious – discuss] and a system of weights and measures.
Number systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.
In mathematics, the notion of number has been extended over the centuries to include zero (0), [3] negative numbers, [4] rational numbers such as one half (), real numbers such as the square root of 2 and π, [5] and complex numbers [6] which extend the real numbers with a square root of −1 (and its combinations with real numbers by adding or ...
Telephone numbers were first used in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when they replaced the request for subscriber names by callers connecting to the switchboard operator. [2] Over the course of telephone history , telephone numbers had various lengths and formats and even included most letters of the alphabet in leading positions when telephone ...
The numbers 0–9 in Chinese huama (花碼) numerals. The ancient Chinese used numerals that look much like the tally system. [27] Numbers one through four were horizontal lines. Five was an X between two horizontal lines; it looked almost exactly the same as the Roman numeral for ten.
Instead of a zero sometimes the digits were marked with dots to indicate their significance, or a space was used as a placeholder. The first widely acknowledged use of zero was in 876. [2] The original numerals were very similar to the modern ones, even down to the glyphs used to represent digits. [1] The digits of the Maya numeral system
Of particular note is the use in Chinese mathematics of a decimal positional notation system, the so-called "rod numerals" in which distinct ciphers were used for numbers between 1 and 10, and additional ciphers for powers of ten. [107]
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 ...