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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.
MacTutor is a free online resource with biographies of over 3000 mathematicians and essays on various topics in mathematics. It is maintained by the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews and updated regularly.
Vor 3 Tagen · Learn about the history of mathematics from ancient times to the present, covering its development in different cultures and civilizations. Explore the main branches of mathematics, such as algebra, geometry, analysis, and statistics, and the sources and methods for studying its past.
Major progress in mathematics in Europe began again at the beginning of the 16 th Century with Pacioli, then Cardan, Tartaglia and Ferrari with the algebraic solution of cubic and quartic equations. Copernicus and Galileo revolutionised the applications of mathematics to the study of the universe.
- Overview
- Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment
- Arithmetic or geometry
- Being versus becoming
foundations of mathematics, the study of the logical and philosophical basis of mathematics, including whether the axioms of a given system ensure its completeness and its consistency. Because mathematics has served as a model for rational inquiry in the West and is used extensively in the sciences, foundational studies have far-reaching consequences for the reliability and extensibility of rational thought itself.
For 2,000 years the foundations of mathematics seemed perfectly solid. Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 bce), which presented a set of formal logical arguments based on a few basic terms and axioms, provided a systematic method of rational exploration that guided mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists well into the 19th century. Even serious objections to the lack of rigour in Sir Isaac Newton’s notion of fluxions (derivatives) in the calculus, raised by the Anglo-Irish empiricist George Berkeley (among others), did not call into question the basic foundations of mathematics. The discovery in the 19th century of consistent alternative geometries, however, precipitated a crisis, for it showed that Euclidean geometry, based on seemingly the most intuitively obvious axiomatic assumptions, did not correspond with reality as mathematicians had believed. This, together with the bold discoveries of the German mathematician Georg Cantor in set theory, made it clear that, to avoid further confusion and satisfactorily answer paradoxical results, a new and more rigorous foundation for mathematics was necessary.
Thus began the 20th-century quest to rebuild mathematics on a new basis independent of geometric intuitions. Early efforts included those of the logicist school of the British mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, the formalist school of the German mathematician David Hilbert, the intuitionist school of the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer, and the French set theory school of mathematicians collectively writing under the pseudonym of Nicolas Bourbaki. Some of the most promising current research is based on the development of category theory by the American mathematician Saunders Mac Lane and the Polish-born American mathematician Samuel Eilenberg following World War II.
This article presents the historical background of foundational questions and 20th-century efforts to construct a new foundational basis for mathematics.
Britannica Quiz
Numbers and Mathematics
A remarkable amount of practical mathematics, some of it even fairly sophisticated, was already developed as early as 2000 bce by the agricultural civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia and perhaps even farther east. However, the first to exhibit an interest in the foundations of mathematics were the ancient Greeks.
Early Greek philosophy was dominated by a dispute as to which is more basic, arithmetic or geometry, and thus whether mathematics should be concerned primarily with the (positive) integers or the (positive) reals, the latter then being conceived as ratios of geometric quantities. (The Greeks confined themselves to positive numbers, as negative numbers were introduced only much later in India by Brahmagupta.) Underlying this dispute was a perceived basic dichotomy, not confined to mathematics but pervading all nature: is the universe made up of discrete atoms (as the philosopher Democritus believed) which hence can be counted, or does it consist of one or more continuous substances (as Thales of Miletus is reputed to have believed) and thus can only be measured? This dichotomy was presumably inspired by a linguistic distinction, analogous to that between English count nouns, such as “apple,” and mass nouns, such as “water.” As Aristotle later pointed out, in an effort to mediate between these divergent positions, water can be measured by counting cups.
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The Pythagorean school of mathematics, founded on the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, originally insisted that only natural and rational numbers exist. Its members only reluctantly accepted the discovery that Square root of√2, the ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side, could not be expressed as the ratio of whole numbers. The remarkable proof of this fact has been preserved by Aristotle.
Another dispute among pre-Socratic philosophers was more concerned with the physical world. Parmenides claimed that in the real world there is no such thing as change and that the flow of time is an illusion, a view with parallels in the Einstein-Minkowski four-dimensional space-time model of the universe. Heracleitus, on the other hand, asserted that change is all-pervasive and is reputed to have said that one cannot step into the same river twice.
Zeno of Elea, a follower of Parmenides, claimed that change is actually impossible and produced four paradoxes to show this. The most famous of these describes a race between Achilles and a tortoise. Since Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise, let us say twice as fast, the latter is allowed a head start of one mile. When Achilles has run one mile, the tortoise will have run half as far again—that is, half a mile. When Achilles has covered that additional half-mile, the tortoise will have run a further quarter-mile. After n + 1 stages, Achilles has runmiles and the tortoise has runmiles, being still 1/2n + 1 miles ahead. So how can Achilles ever catch up with the tortoise (see figure)?
- Joachim Lambek
Explore the history of mathematics from ancient times to the present day with this interactive timeline. Discover the names, dates, and achievements of the most influential mathematicians and their discoveries.
Explore the diverse mathematical traditions of different regions and cultures through a series of posters. Learn how European colonialism influenced the global spread of a specific style of mathematics based on proof.
Unknown Civilizations have existed in the deep past. Printed, Ebooks, Audiobooks, and More
