The earliest development of mathematics is closely tied to the development of counting and numbers. For thousands of years before there was a system for writing numbers, ancient people used a variety of methods to either estimate or guess at the...

Mathematics and writing first appeared around 3000 B.C. in Mesopotamia. Originally used as a means of accounting, the abstract concept of numbers, independent of the things being measured, developed over the course of the next thousand years. In the...

From the dawn of civilization, humankind has needed to count and measure. Even the earliest civilizations developed effective and efficient number systems. Ancient mathematics is surprisingly sophisticated and, in many cases, quite similar to the...

The eighteenth century was a time of great progress in the field of mathematics. Included in this progress were advances in ways of teaching mathematics, including a number of textbooks at all levels of complexity by some of the world's...

The area of study known as the history of mathematics is primarily an investigation into the origin of new discoveries in mathematics, to a lesser extent an investigation into the standard mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern...

Mathematics has evolved from a multicultural perspective. Modern Western mathematics is based on theories from the Greeks, Europeans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Arabs, Russians, and Chinese. Mathematics should consider the influences of various countries. We hear much about the necessity of learning about other...

INFINITE ASCENT: A SHORT HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS by David Berlinski Modern Library, 2005, 197 pp. ISBN: 0-679-64234-X The first thing that must be said about David Berlinski's Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics is that it is beautifully written and remarkably non-technical....