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Chapter 1 - Summary The History of

Mathematics: an
Introduction
History of Mathematics (Vanderbilt University)

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Megan Troutman
Math 3000: History of Math
Chapter 1: Early Number Systems and Symbols
8/25/17

1.1 Primitive Counting

• A Sense of Number
o Mathemata: Greek root of mathematics; used to indicate any subject of instruction or
study
 Pythagoreans used it to describe arithmetic and geometry o Mathematics began
in Classical Greece from 600 to 300 BC
o Egypt and Babylonia had a significant body of knowledge that is mathematics 3-4
thousand years ago
o Mathematics originated with practical problems of counting and recording numbers o
Central Australian aboriginal tribes with any number larger than two called simple
“much” or “many”; Southern American Indians and the Bushmen of South Africa has
similar counting systems
o Tallying to count – one-to-one system  Tailler: to cut; French root of tally
 Taliare: to cut in Latin
• Notches as Tally Marks o Systems of
tallying dates back to Old Stone Age
groups of 30,000 BC.
o Shinbone of a young wolf found in Czechoslovakia in 1937 with 55 notches
 Lunar calendars o Ishango along Lake Edward (Egypt)
 17500 BC
 Handle of a tool used for engraving, tattooing, or writing
 Groups of notches arranged in three definite columns
 Lunar count
o Circular disks, triangles, and cones used to record counts o Oldest date back to 8000
BC, incised with parallel lines
o 16 main forms of tokens, perforated with small holes; abandoned around 3000 BC o
Notched stick
 British Exchequer tallies: bills of exchange
 Width of cut determined value
 Abolished in 1826 by British Parliament
 1834: tallies were being burned in the House of Lords and a bigger fire started
that destroyed the old Houses of Parliament
• The Peruvian Quipus: Knots as Numbers
o Quipus: knotted cords o Incas of
Peru
o Official of the knots recorded official transactions concerning the land and subjects of
the city

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o Thick main cord with finer cords of different lengths and colors o Santal headsmen
made knots in strings as recent as 1872 in India o Maya 300-900 AD
 Hieroglyphs, 1000 glyphs
 20 count system (vigesimal)
 Dots for 1; lines for 5; shell for 0 o River valleys of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates,
Indus, and Yangtze where special symbols for numbers first appeared

Number Recording of the Egyptians and Greeks

• The History of Herodotus o Writing of history is a Greek invention o Herodotus 
Historian
 3 journeys collecting material and recording his impressions
 Interpreted the state of the world at his time as a result of change in the past
and felt that the change could be described
• Hieroglyphic Representation of Numbers o As soon as the unification of Egypt under a
single leader became an accomplished fact, a powerful and extensive administrative
system began to evolve
 Census, taxes, army maintained o Around 3500 BC, the Egyptians had a fully
developed number system that allowed counting to continue indefinitely with the
introduction of a new symbol from time to time
o King Narmer
 Macehead and slate palette used to preserve the official record of the king’s
accomplishment
• Took 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats
o Book of the Dead
 Collection of religious and magical texts whose principle aim was to secure
for the deceased a satisfactory afterlife
 “I work for you, o ye spirits, we are in number four million, six hundred and
one thousand, and two hundred.”
o Positional system: system in which one and the same symbol has a different
significance depending on its position in the numerical representation
o Egyptians did not have a notation for arithmetical operations until Rhind Papyrus
made glyphs for them in 1650 BC
• Egyptian Hieratic Numeration o Papyrus used to replace
carving on stone or metal o Egyptian priest then developed a
more rapid, less pictorial style called hieratic
(sacred) script; symbols were written in a cursive (free-running) hand o
Demotic (popular) script replaced hieratic, agitated commas each representing
different signs
o Cipherization: single mark used to represent a collection of like symbols (like our
numbers today)
• The Greek Alphabetic Numeral System

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o 5th century BC, Greeks developed a ciphered numeral system with an extensive set of
symbols
o 24 letters of the ordinary Greek alphabet, augmented by 3 obsolete Phoenician letters
(6, 90, and 900) o Accent mark placed to the left and below unit letter multiplied
corresponding number by 1000
o 10,000 was represented by M from myriad (ten thousand)
 M placed next to or below numbers 1 to 9999 multiplied the number by
10,000
 MM is 10,0002
o Arranged highest multiple of 10 on the left to the lowest on the right
o Distinguished numbers from letters by accent in top right-hand corner or line over the
characters
o Greek multiplication was computed similar to foiling
 24x53 = (20+4)(50+3)
o Gematria: a number is assigned to each letter of the alphabet and the value of a word
is the sum of the numbers represented
 Catholic theologians during the Reformation were devising alphabet schemes
in which 666 was shown to stand for the name Martin Luther, thereby
supporting their contention that he was the Antichrist.
 “L’Empereur Napolean” can be made equivalent to 666
 Amen is equal to 99 by gematria; in old editions of the Bible, 99 would appear
instead of Amen
 Pompeii, “I love her whose number is 545.”

Number Recording of the Babylonians

• Babylonian Cuneiform Script o Around 3000 BC, Babylonians developed
pictographs (picture writing like hieroglyphs)
o Wedge in Latin is cuneus  cuneiform o Cuneiform was a result of writing in clay
 Stylus did not allow for drawing curved lines so all symbols were composed
of wedges oriented in different directions “like bird tracks in wet sand”
• Deciphering Cuneiform: Grotefend and Rawlinson o 400,000 Babylonian clay
tablets; 400 have mathematical content
o Grotefend wagered that he could decipher a certain cuneiform inscription from
Persepolis provided that his friends would supply him with the previously published
literature on the subject
 Deciphered “King of Kings” and names Darius, Xerxes, and Hystapes
 1802, had investigations presented to Academy of Science in Gottingen, but
he was ridiculed
o Rawlinson

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 516 BC, Darius the Great had the Mountain of the Gods be engraved; 13
panels in three languages (Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian) using
cuneiform
• Behistun: a towering rock cliff, “the Mountain of the Gods,” that rises dramatically
above an ancient caravan road to Babylon o Monumental rock inscriptions o Copied
by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson
o Sometimes called the Mesopotamian Rosetta Stone
 But this doesn’t have any Greek to help translate, just 3 different types of
cuneiform
 By 1837, he had copied half of the 414 lines and translated the first two
paragraphs
 Published all 263 lines of Elamite and translation in 1846
 He also deciphered the Babylonian cuneiform
• Babylonian Positional Number System o The Babylonians were the only pre-Grecian
people who made even a partial use of a positional number system (systems based on
notion of place value)
o Sexagesimal: 60 base
 3 25 4 = 3*60 + 25*60 + 4 = 12,304
2

 Use of sexagesimal confirmed by two tablets found in 1854 at Senkerah by

W.K. Loftus
 No symbol for 0; gap was often used to indicate that a whole sexagesimal
place was missing
 300 BC, used a divider as a place holder for 0, but did not use it at the end of a
number
 About 150 AD, Ptolemy began using omicron in a medial and terminal
positions for 0 o Origin of Sexagesimal
 Most convenient since it was small and had a lot of divisors
 Natural origin because of 360 day year
 Evolved from merger between two people, one with the decimal system and
one with a 6-system
o Principal instrument of calculation among astronomers o Ptolemy’s
Megale Syntaxis (The Great Collection)
o Arabs Almagest (The Greatest), fundamental astronomy textbook until
Copernicus
 Writing in Ancient China o Middle of the second millennium BC, Chinese were
already keeping records of astronomical events on bone fragments
o By 1400 BC, Chinese had positional numeration system using 9 signs
o Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts, 150 BC o Bamboo
civilization, uses bamboo to make books  Written characters arranged in
vertical lines
 Joining cords often rotted and broke, so older slips were lost o Books
tended to accumulate in palace or government libraries, where they disappeared in

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the great interdynastic upheavals o 221 BC, Shih Huang-ti tried to destroy all books
of learning and nearly succeeded o Misconception that the Chinese made
considerable progress is due to Jesuits in the early 1600s discovering that one of the
important government departments was the
Office of Mathematics
 Jesuits thought it was used to promote mathematical studies
 Mainly used to train officials in making calendars o It was forbidden
to study mathematics without the Emperor’s authorization

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