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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.
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 ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; [a] 1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics.
[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 ...
Further evidence for the views of Pythagoras and his school, although fragmentary and sometimes contradictory, comes from Alexander Polyhistor. Alexander tells us that central doctrines of the Pythagorieans were the harmony of numbers and the ideal that the mathematical world has primacy over, or can account for the existence of, the physical ...
Al-Khwarizmi's work on arithmetic was responsible for introducing the Arabic numerals, based on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system developed in Indian mathematics, to the Western world. The term "algorithm" is derived from the algorism , the technique of performing arithmetic with Hindu-Arabic numerals developed by al-Khwārizmī.
Eratosthenes made several important contributions to mathematics and science, and was a friend of Archimedes. Around 255 BC, he invented the armillary sphere. In On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies, [11] Cleomedes credited him with having calculated the Earth's circumference around 240 BC, with high accuracy. [2]