Dr. Robert Knight's Math Web Site

 

Evergreen Valley College

Please go to the EVC Moodle Course
for the Course Syllabus

 

robert.knight@evc.edu
Things you never knew about math around the world

Japan: in the 15th century the Japanese developed an abacus called the soroban which in 1946 was tested against an electronic calculator for speed and accuracy - the soroban beat the calculator by a final score of 4-1!
India: around 1800 BC the Indians began working with infinity. By 400 BC they had defined five different types of infinity!
Persia: Persian mathematician named Muhammad al-Khwarizmi was the first to use the term algebra (al-Jabr) in the title of his book on solving linear and quadratic equations
Latin America: The Mayans of central America were the first to use the number zero as a placeholder. This allowed them to use very large numbers far ahead of the rest of the world.
Greece: Greek history is full of stories in mathematics, including a cult that worship numbers! The Pythagorean Brotherhood believed that all numbers could be written as fractions. When one member proved that the square root of two could not be written as a fraction the brotherhood killed him for blasphemy!
Egypt: The first culture to work with rational numbers were the Egyptians around 3000 BC where they only used unit fractions, or fractions with numerators of one. Fractions that couldn’t be written with a numerator of one can be written as a sum of fractions with a numerator of 1.

ee can be written as a sum of fractions with a numerator of 1