/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15895465
A lot more advanced than you might have assumed. Ancient mathemeticians made pretty great progress at geometry. Much of the early mathematics were developed due to practical needs, and as such it appears the ancients had a pragmatic approach towards math. For example, in ancient Egypt, geometric problem solving became important due to the need to measure land to resolve disputes after the yearly flooding destroyed land markers. Ropes were used to survey and calculate area.

That being said, even back then they had a distinction between "pure" and "applied" mathematics. The priestly class had deep interest in tracking the objects in the sky which led to different sort of developments.

Perhaps the biggest distinction between modern and ancient mathematics is the idea of numbers, equations, and mathematical objects as abstract entities, seperate from the physical manifestations which they model. For example, Greeks had an idea more accurately described as "magnitude" than "number". They didn't necessarily see "16" as having any meaning besides the geometric length of 16 units.

The Egyptians seemed to have a strange relationship with Rational numbers. They had a fascination with 2/3 and saw a ratio as completed when expressed as such. For example, in the Ahmes Papyrus, instead of 9/10, this quantity was expressed as 1/30 + 1/5 + 2/3. In other words, they saw a ratio as complete if it had 1 in the numberator OR if it was 2/3.

Ancient Egyptians had "solve for x" algebraic problems or what they called "heap" problems which involved solving for an unknown quantity.

Another huge development from Ancient India which was the decimal system, and 0. We take it for granted nowadays, but it really was revolutionary, almost as important as the development of analytic geometry imo. This positional system is so superior we still use it.

There's a clay tablet that has been suggested to be evidence of Ancient Babylonian mathemeticians using calculus(1/2)