The Gateway Chronicle 2020

Mathematics and Economics
67
The history of numbers and
their development into modern
mathematics
Al-Khwarizmi
W
hat are numbers? They are
many things but are, first and
foremost, a way of clearly expressing
the world around us. They, unlike
words, are unambiguous, and one of
the most fascinating things about numbers
is that
they are
thousands
of
years
old - ten
thousand
to
be precise.
Roughly
at the
dawn of
the Neolithic
age, in
what is
now the
Czech
Republic,
numbers
made
their
first recorded
appearance in the form of the
humble counting stick. The counting stick
in question was a wolf bone, with notches
carved into it in groups of five (why five?
Work it out on your fingers…). This may
not sound like the birth of maths as we
know it today, with all of our chaos theories
and non-Euclidian geometry but, at a
time when life was short and brutal, this
was a major intellectual achievement.
Unfortunately, this was the extent of
mathematical and numerical progress for
the next 6000 years. The next stop on the
mathematical timeline is in Babylonia. The
expansion of trade powered the development
of mathematics greatly, as with
goods also moved ideas, hand in hand.
This was particularly evident in Babylonia,
which lay in what is now Southern
Iraq. It sat on a crossroads of two major
trade routes, running east to west, so it
was somewhat inevitable that this vital
economic region would see a certain degree
of development in ideas, namely
mathematical. It was here that the most
primitive algebra was developed, along
with something a little more important:
Base 60. Base 60 was the unreliable counting
system used by the Babylonians.
Whilst it wasn’t reliable for counting, it
paved the way for much more significant
counting systems such as base 10 (denary
counting system), which we use to count
with today, and even binary – something
used heavily in computers. Furthermore,
Base 60 lives on today in the way we
reckon time, with 60 seconds to the minute
and 60 minutes to the hour. Despite
the unreliability of base 60 to count with,
clearly the Babylonians did something
right after all!
Just over a thousand years down the timeline,
we see another very significant mathematical
breakthrough – but this time in
India. 900 B.C marks the birthday of perhaps
the most important mathematical
figure in existence – zero. Muhammad ibn
Musa al-Khwarizmi came up with a term
to finally embody the already ubiquitous
idea of having nothing of something.