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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.
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, theories and theorems that are developed and proved for the needs of ... or discovered (as in ...
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 ...
[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]
Many areas of mathematics began with the study of real world problems, before the underlying rules and concepts were identified and defined as abstract structures.For example, geometry has its origins in the calculation of distances and areas in the real world; algebra started with methods of solving problems in arithmetic.
The word "algebra" is derived from the Arabic word الجبر al-jabr, and this comes from the treatise written in the year 830 by the medieval Persian mathematician, Al-Khwārizmī, whose Arabic title, Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa-l-muqābala, can be translated as The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
The History of Mathematics consists of seven chapters, [1] featuring many case studies. [2] [3] Its first, "Mathematics: myth and history", gives a case study of the history of Fermat's Last Theorem and of Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, [4] making a case that the proper understanding of this history should go beyond a chronicle of individual mathematicians and their accomplishments ...