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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.
German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mathematics is the queen of the sciences—and number theory is the queen of mathematics." [ 1 ] Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example, rational numbers ), or defined as generalizations of the ...
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.
There are many areas of mathematics, which include number theory (the study of numbers), algebra (the study of formulas and related structures), geometry (the study of shapes and spaces that contain them), analysis (the study of continuous changes), and set theory (presently used as a foundation for all mathematics).
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.
Humans have evolved to mentally represent numbers in two major ways from observation (not formal math). [9] These representations are often thought to be innate [10] (see Numerical cognition), to be shared across human cultures, [11] to be common to multiple species, [12] and not to be the result of individual learning or cultural transmission.
A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, a relation between mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula.
The aleph numbers differ from the infinity (∞) commonly found in algebra and calculus, in that the alephs measure the sizes of sets, while infinity is commonly defined either as an extreme limit of the real number line (applied to a function or sequence that "diverges to infinity" or "increases without bound"), or as an extreme point of the ...