Mathematics, the science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved

from elemental practices of counting, measuring, and describing the shapes of

objects. It deals with logical reasoning and quantitative calculation, and its
development has involved an increasing degree of idealization and abstraction
of its subject matter. Since the 17th century, mathematics has been
an indispensable adjunct to the physical sciences and technology, and in more
recent times it has assumed a similar role in the quantitative aspects of the life
sciences.

In many cultures—under the stimulus of the needs of practical pursuits, such

as commerce and agriculture—mathematics has developed far beyond basic
counting. This growth has been greatest in societies complex enough to
sustain these activities and to provide leisure for contemplation and the
opportunity to build on the achievements of earlier mathematicians.

All mathematical systems (for example, Euclidean geometry) are

combinations of sets of axioms and of theorems that can be logically deduced
from the axioms. Inquiries into the logical and philosophical basis of
mathematics reduce to questions of whether the axioms of a given system
ensure its completeness and its consistency. For full treatment of this
aspect, see mathematics, foundations of.

This article offers a history of mathematics from ancient times to the present.
As a consequence of the exponential growth of science, most mathematics has
developed since the 15th century CE, and it is a historical fact that, from the
15th century to the late 20th century, new developments in mathematics were
largely concentrated in Europe and North America. For these reasons, the
bulk of this article is devoted to European developments since 1500.

This does not mean, however, that developments elsewhere have been
unimportant. Indeed, to understand the history of mathematics in Europe, it
is necessary to know its history at least in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt,
in ancient Greece, and in Islamic civilization from the 9th to the 15th century.
The way in which these civilizations influenced one another and the important
direct contributions Greece and Islam made to later developments are
discussed in the first parts of this article.

India’s contributions to the development of contemporary mathematics were

made through the considerable influence of Indian achievements on Islamic
mathematics during its formative years. A separate article, South Asian
mathematics, focuses on the early history of mathematics in the Indian
subcontinent and the development there of the modern decimal place-
value numeral system. The article East Asian mathematics covers the mostly
independent development of mathematics in China, Japan, Korea, and
Vietnam.
Ancient mathematical sources
It is important to be aware of the character of the sources for the study of the
history of mathematics. The history of Mesopotamian and Egyptian
mathematics is based on the extant original documents written by scribes.
Although in the case of Egypt these documents are few, they are all of a type
and leave little doubt that Egyptian mathematics was, on the whole,
elementary and profoundly practical in its orientation. For Mesopotamian
mathematics, on the other hand, there are a large number of clay tablets,
which reveal mathematical achievements of a much higher order than those of
the Egyptians. The tablets indicate that the Mesopotamians had a great deal of
remarkable mathematical knowledge, although they offer no evidence that
this knowledge was organized into a deductive system. Future research may
reveal more about the early development of mathematics in Mesopotamia or
about its influence on Greek mathematics, but it seems likely that this picture
of Mesopotamian mathematics will stand.

From the period before Alexander the Great, no Greek mathematical

documents have been preserved except for fragmentary paraphrases, and,
even for the subsequent period, it is well to remember that the oldest copies
of Euclid’s Elements are in Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th
century CE. This stands in complete contrast to the situation described above
for Egyptian and Babylonian documents. Although, in general outline, the
present account of Greek mathematics is secure, in such important matters as
the origin of the axiomatic method, the pre-Euclidean theory of ratios, and the
discovery of the conic sections, historians have given competing accounts
based on fragmentary texts, quotations of early writings culled from
nonmathematical sources, and a considerable amount of conjecture.

Many important treatises from the early period of Islamic mathematics have
not survived or have survived only in Latin translations, so that there are still
many unanswered questions about the relationship between early Islamic
mathematics and the mathematics of Greece and India. In addition, the
amount of surviving material from later centuries is so large in comparison
with that which has been studied that it is not yet possible to offer any sure
judgment of what later Islamic mathematics did not contain, and therefore it
is not yet possible to evaluate with any assurance what was original in
European mathematics from the 11th to the 15th century.

In modern times the invention of printing has largely solved the problem of
obtaining secure texts and has allowed historians of mathematics to
concentrate their editorial efforts on the correspondence or the unpublished
works of mathematicians. However, the exponential growth of mathematics
means that, for the period from the 19th century on, historians are able to
treat only the major figures in any detail. In addition, there is, as the period
gets nearer the present, the problem of perspective. Mathematics, like any
other human activity, has its fashions, and the nearer one is to a given period,
the more likely these fashions will look like the wave of the future. For this
reason, the present article makes no attempt to assess the most recent
developments in the subject.
John L. Berggren
Mathematics in ancient Mesopotamia
Until the 1920s it was commonly supposed that mathematics had its birth
among the ancient Greeks. What was known of earlier traditions, such as the
Egyptian as represented by the Rhind papyrus (edited for the first time only in
1877), offered at best a meagre precedent. This impression gave way to a very
different view as historians succeeded in deciphering and interpreting the
technical materials from ancient Mesopotamia.

Owing to the durability of the Mesopotamian scribes’ clay tablets, the

surviving evidence of this culture is substantial. Existing specimens of
mathematics represent all the major eras—the Sumerian kingdoms of the 3rd
millennium BCE, the Akkadian and Babylonian regimes (2nd millennium), and
the empires of the Assyrians (early 1st millennium), Persians (6th through 4th
century BCE), and Greeks (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE). The level of
competence was already high as early as the Old Babylonian dynasty, the time
of the lawgiver-king Hammurabi (c. 18th century BCE), but after that there
were few notable advances. The application of mathematics to astronomy,
however, flourished during the Persian and Seleucid (Greek) periods.
The numeral system and arithmetic operations
Unlike the Egyptians, the mathematicians of the Old Babylonian period went
far beyond the immediate challenges of their official accounting duties. For
example, they introduced a versatile numeral system, which, like the modern
system, exploited the notion of place value, and they developed computational
methods that took advantage of this means of expressing numbers; they
solved linear and quadratic problems by methods much like those now used
in algebra; their success with the study of what are now called Pythagorean
number triples was a remarkable feat in number theory. The scribes who
made such discoveries must have believed mathematics to be worthy of study
in its own right, not just as a practical tool.

The older Sumerian system of numerals followed an additive decimal (base-

10) principle similar to that of the Egyptians. But the Old Babylonian system
converted this into a place-value system with the base of 60 (sexagesimal).
The reasons for the choice of 60 are obscure, but one good mathematical
reason might have been the existence of so many divisors (2, 3, 4, and 5, and
some multiples) of the base, which would have greatly facilitated the operation
of division. For numbers from 1 to 59, the symbols for 1 and for 10 were
combined in the simple additive manner (e.g., represented 32). But to
express larger values, the Babylonians applied the concept of place value. For
example, 60 was written as , 70 as , 80 as , and so on. In fact, could
represent any power of 60. The context determined which power was
intended. By the 3rd century BCE, the Babylonians appear to have developed a
placeholder symbol that functioned as a zero, but its precise meaning and use
is still uncertain. Furthermore, they had no mark to separate numbers
into integral and fractional parts (as with the modern decimal point). Thus,
the three-place numeral 3 7 30 could represent 31/8 (i.e., 3 + 7/60 + 30/60 ),
2
1871/2 (i.e., 3 × 60 + 7 + 30/60), 11,250 (i.e., 3 × 60 + 7 × 60 + 30), or a
2

multiple of these numbers by any power of 60.

The four arithmetic operations were performed in the same way as in the
modern decimal system, except that carrying occurred whenever a sum
reached 60 rather than 10. Multiplication was facilitated by means of tables;
one typical tablet lists the multiples of a number by 1, 2, 3,…, 19, 20, 30, 40,
and 50. To multiply two numbers several places long, the scribe first broke the
problem down into several multiplications, each by a one-place number, and
then looked up the value of each product in the appropriate tables. He found
the answer to the problem by adding up these intermediate results. These
tables also assisted in division, for the values that head them were
all reciprocals of regular numbers.

Regular numbers are those whose prime factors divide the base; the
reciprocals of such numbers thus have only a finite number of places (by
contrast, the reciprocals of nonregular numbers produce an infinitely
repeating numeral). In base 10, for example, only numbers with factors of 2
and 5 (e.g., 8 or 50) are regular, and the reciprocals (1/8 = 0.125, 1/50 = 0.02)
have finite expressions; but the reciprocals of other numbers (such as 3 and 7)

repeat infinitely and , respectively, where the bar indicates

the digits that continually repeat). In base 60, only numbers with factors of 2,
3, and 5 are regular; for example, 6 and 54 are regular, so that their
reciprocals (10 and 1 6 40) are finite. The entries in the multiplication table for
1 6 40 are thus simultaneously multiples of its reciprocal 1/54. To divide a
number by any regular number, then, one can consult the table of multiples
for its reciprocal.