The rulers or high government officials must have ordered Babylonian mathematicians to calculate the number of workers and days necessary for the building of a canal, and to calculate the total expenses of wages of the workers. .
There are several Old Babylonian mathematical texts in which various quantities concerning the digging of a canal are asked for. They are YBC 4666, 7164, and VAT 7528, all of which are written in Sumerian ., and YBC 9874 and BM 85196, No. 15, which are written in Akkadian . . From the mathematical point of view these problems are comparatively simple (Muroi).
The Babylonians used their mathematics not in the way we do today, by teaching, but by building their civilization into what it became. Muroi speaks of how Babylonian mathematics helped create a society and how it helped the Mesopotamian region become as fertile as it was. It is for this reason that they only used positive forms in their answers. Had their use for mathematics been for reasons other than land, monetary, and other non-scientific reasons, they would have had to conclude their method with a negative result. .
Moving along the historical timeline, the Greeks were the next prominent mathematics society. Euclid of Alexandria is the most prominent mathematician of antiquity best known for his treatise on mathematics The Elements. The long lasting nature of The Elements must make Euclid the leading mathematics teacher of all time. However little is known of Euclid's life except that he taught at Alexandria in Egypt. Proclus, the last major Greek philosopher, who lived around 450 AD wrote:.
Not much younger than these [pupils of Plato] is Euclid, who put together the "Elements", arranging in order many of Eudoxus' theorems, perfecting many of Theaetetus's, and also bringing to irrefutable demonstration the things which had been only loosely proved by his predecessors. This man lived in the time of the first Ptolemy; for Archimedes, who followed closely upon the first Ptolemy makes mention of Euclid, and further they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there were a shorted way to study geometry than the Elements, to which he replied that there was no royal road to geometry.
You've heard the phrase too many times "Will we ever use this in real life?" Is the education system in America even teaching us the useful knowledge we need to get through the next 60 years? The answer is no, in recent decades our education system hasn't kept pace with the rest of the world. In the...
When studying the history of algebra, you find that it started back in Egypt and Babylon. The Egyptians knew how to solve linear (ax=b) and quadratic (ax2+bx=c) equations, as well as indeterminate equations such as x2+y2=z2 where several unknowns are involved (Dauben). ... It contained material on linear equations of such types as x+1/7x=19 and dealt extensively on unit fractions. ...
In Muslim history we can see from the writings of Muhammad that anyone who spoke Arabic as their first or main language was classed as Arabic, it was not a classification of geography or birth (Zahoor, 1992). ... As the founder of Algebra he took this to the extent of not only defining and developing the subject but also developing the way that analysis solutions could be developed to both linear as well as quadratic equations (Zahoor, 1992). ...
