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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.
[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.
Mathematics involves the description and manipulation of abstract objects that consist of either abstractions from nature or—in modern mathematics—purely abstract entities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. Mathematics uses pure reason to prove properties of objects, a proof consisting of a succession of ...
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 ...
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 ...
Greek mathematics constitutes an important period in the history of mathematics: fundamental in respect of geometry and for the idea of formal proof. [44] Greek mathematicians also contributed to number theory , mathematical astronomy , combinatorics , mathematical physics , and, at times, approached ideas close to the integral calculus .
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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.