Who invented Maths? │ The History of Mathematics with Luc de Brabandère

From Egyptians measuring with the Sun, to modern algorithms for self-driving cars, here is our 20-episode series ‘The History of Maths’. It represents a fascinating journey through human civilization.

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No long time ago, mathematics simply didn't exist. So how, did it start finally? Probably the first step was to count. Archaeologists for example have found bones with engraved dashes (-). Definitely this shows that people, when they started to count, calculus for example (the word calculus comes from Latin calculus which means a little stone or a pebble), they used to use stones to count. That was the first step.

And then the first big thing which happened, somebody, probably in the area of Iraq, which at the time was called Mesopotamia measures potamus between the two rivers the Tigris and Euphrates. Somebody suddenly realised that he was looking at three apples and three dogs and hey, there must be something common between those two sets: the number, the digit 3 was born. Yes, in fact there is a common characteristic between the two sets. Three, the digit, it looks obvious, but it was not and suddenly it became possible to count and to write what was common between the two sets.

Of course, it was great but immediately there was a limit. How do you count for example the people in the village? How do you do it? You cannot have any infinity of digits so, the next step was to combine digits and indeed, with two digits you can have a lot of ‘numbers’. The number was born- that's the next step.

With the number, certainly it became possible to count large numbers like how many hairs I have? It suddenly became possible and several systems were designed/developed by different people around the world. One of the most famous for example is the Roman system. The Roman Empire of Roman people used to use seven digits and with combination, they could count infinity amounts and it looks like progress, but there was a big problem. For example, you can write eighteen, XVIII that is 18 but now imagine you want to add XVIII and II or + 2. How do you do that? There is a problem. It's not easy at all. The problem- no zero. It's hard to realise and to understand how it's possible for the Roman Empire not to have a digit for zero. And it came many centuries afterwards, it came from the East India, Hindu, Arabic and somebody maybe called al-Khwarizmi and from this side came the idea of zero. It was not immediately accepted because a digit to qualify something that doesn't exist, there was some resistance to that. Again, it looks obvious, it was not. But with zero, suddenly another air suddenly became possible and that's the history of mathematics. It's a sequence of steps and each of those steps have made some progress and led to the world we are living in today.

Join us next time to see how Egyptians invented geometry and use it for example to calculate the size of the earth.

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