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Mathematics has a remarkable ability to cross cultural boundaries and time periods. As a human activity, the practice of mathematics has a social side, which includes education, careers, recognition, popularization, and so on. In education, mathematics is a core part of the curriculum and forms an important element of the STEM academic disciplines.
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 ...
[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.
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 .
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.
Foundations of mathematics are the logical and mathematical framework that allows the development of mathematics without generating self-contradictory theories, and, in particular, to have reliable concepts of theorems, proofs, algorithms, etc. This may also include the philosophical study of the relation of this framework with reality. [1]