In the impression of many people, mathematics is not only as mysterious as fog, but also as dull as ditch water.
Personally, the main reason for this phenomenon is that our math is not taught by teacher China.
Whenever the math teacher can teach monotonous addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, tell the story behind math, such as why football has 12 pentagons? What are the "Holy Ten Structure" and "Druid Rope"? What strategy did Alpha Dog use to win the "Man-Machine Go Competition"? ..... I believe that most people who hate math now will become fond of it.
Fortunately, not all people engaged in mathematics in the world are introverted and inarticulate. For example, the young French mathematician Micael Lonet.
Mikael Lonai is a doctoral student majoring in probability theory. His tutor is a female mathematician Frada Rimic, and his teacher can be traced back to the Italian mathematician tartaglia in the 6th century. This is a huge mathematical family, and well-known names such as Galileo and Newton are among them.
Mikael Lonai is committed to the popularization and promotion of mathematics. He likes to squeeze into the free market, hang out in booths selling mobile phone accessories and painting tattoos, pretend to perform magic tricks, and then enjoy the audience's jaw-dropping and unbelievable expression when they are told that they are actually playing math games when they are playing high.
Everything counts: the mathematical journey from prehistoric times to artificial intelligence spans thousands of years and continues mikael Lonai's consistent style. With his unique perspective and humorous language, he vividly described the most unpleasant mathematics and history, which made people want to stop.
There is a saying circulating on the internet: everything I invented before I was born is taken for granted; Everything I invented between the ages of 15-35 is destined to change the world; All my inventions after the age of 35 are anti-human.
According to this theory, it is obvious that both the number 123 and the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are taken for granted in our eyes. However, nothing in the world is taken for granted. Digital symbols and geometric algebra have gone through thousands of years of exploration and discovery before they become what they are today.
"Everything is Number" introduces us to how cold numbers and operation symbols appear. How did geometry, algebra and calculus go through? What stories are hidden behind the familiar theorems, paradoxes and formulas ... these are the other side of mathematics that we are not familiar with and understand.
When insomnia occurs, most people will choose to count sheep. However, when you count "one sheep, two sheep, three sheep …", do you know that the numbers 123 actually have a lot to do with counting sheep?
Some people may think that numbers appeared with the invention of human language. However, if you knew that the languages of the aborigines in the Amazon jungle today are only 1 and 2, you wouldn't have this idea.
Thanks to the rich archaeological discoveries in Mesopotamia, we can travel through time and space to understand how numbers entered human thinking step by step more than 5,000 years ago.
Mesopotamia had a highly developed civilization at that time. There are many cities and developed businesses, among which animal husbandry, especially sheep farming, is extremely prosperous.
Because the flock is too big, every year the owner of the flock will give his sheep to a professional shepherd for grazing. In this process, there is an important problem to be solved, that is: how to ensure the same number of sheep released and recycled?
Therefore, Mesopotamia invented a series of unique symbols and carved them on clay tablets to record the number of sheep.
So, do these symbols mark the invention of numbers? The answer is no.
Imagine that when we record 8 sheep and 8 cows, there must be a * * * same number 8 between them. In other words, after writing eight sheep, you just need to change the sheep into cows.
However, during this period, the symbols of eight sheep and eight cows recorded by Mesopotamians were completely different. In other words, people at that time did not abstract numbers from physical objects such as cattle and sheep.
Later, after repeating the activities of sheep hundreds of millions of times, Mesopotamia suddenly had an epiphany and they began to separate numbers from objects. The concrete evidence is that the writing habits of eight sheep and eight cows on the clay tablets are the same as those of us modern people. Is to write a number 8 first, and then draw the symbol of cow or sheep.
Although we can't know the specific time of the epiphany, there is no doubt that this moment is a great moment: numbers have appeared in human life and pushed human civilization to a new height.
When we first enter primary school, the math teacher will teach us Arabic numerals 1234 first. I still remember when the math teacher said: Arabic numerals are called Arabic numerals, but they were not invented by Arabs.
So, who invented Arabic numerals? The answer is Indian.
To be honest, I've always wondered why Indians are so talented in the IT field. This is exactly the opposite of my consistent impression of India, that is, backwardness.
However, after knowing the history of mathematics in India, I was relieved. After all, Indians developed advanced mathematics thousands of years ago. For example, Brahma Gupta, who lived in the 7th century, was the first person in history to give a complete mathematical description of negative numbers. Yes! It is a negative number that many modern people don't understand.
But in the tradition of Indians, they pay more attention to the oral transmission of knowledge. As a result, the spread of Arabic numerals invented by Indians fell to Arabs.
Although Arabic numerals were not invented by Arabs, the name Arabic numerals reflects the mathematical achievements of Arabs from the side.
After Mesopotamia learned the numbers by counting sheep, the Arab Empire began to rise from this land in 3500. Later, a world-famous city was ordered to be built by the caliph Abu Mansour.
Different from the square city in ancient China, the city wall consists of two standard concentric circles. At that time, it was called "the city of light" and "the capital of the world". Of course, maybe you are more familiar with its other name: Baghdad.
This round city has not only a well-stocked library, but also a home of wisdom for top scholars from all over the world. All these represent the world's leading culture and science in the Arab Empire, and the mathematician Hua Razimi is the representative of this period.
Walazmi has made outstanding achievements in algebraic equations, and the word algebra in Latin is transformed from the name of Walazmi's Arabic works.
In addition, the book "Numeric Arithmetic in India" by Wahrazimi promoted the spread of Arabic numerals. During the Renaissance, with a large number of books from the Arab Kingdom flowing into Italy, Arabic numerals stepped out of the round cities and began the journey of dominating the world.
The measurement of the earth has existed since ancient times.
The ancient Egyptians used ropes to measure the land, thus calculating the area that would be affected when the Nile overflowed.
In ancient Greece, there was such a profession, the royal surveyor. When Alexander the Great fought in the 4th century BC, he took several royal surveyors with him. From Egypt in the west to India in the east, these royal surveyors used an incredible tool to help Alexander the Great map his territory.
Their only tool is their own feet. In modern eyes, this method is too unreliable. But royal surveyors are absolutely worthy of the word royal, and the error between their measurement results and actual data is within 5%.
200 years later, the ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes made another great attempt to measure the circumference of the earth. First, he measured the inclination of sunlight in two cities. Then infer that the circumference of the earth is 50 times the distance between the two cities.
So, how to measure the distance between two cities that are far apart? So, the royal surveyor appeared again. However, this time they counted not their own steps, but an animal, that is, a camel famous for its steady pace.
Finally, with the help of camels, Eratosthenes calculated that the circumference of the earth is 39,375 kilometers, and the error with the real circumference of 40,008 is only 2%!
Without the help of modern scientific and technological means, even modern people can rarely achieve such accuracy. Surprisingly, the Greeks did it 2000 years ago.
In modern times, mathematics has experienced more than ten centuries of development, especially the outstanding contribution of Arab scholars in trigonometric functions, and Europeans began to use triangulation to map the world in detail.
This picture is a map of France drawn by the Cassini family, a French scientific family in the18th century.
With the development of science and technology, mathematical inventions such as trigonometric function have not withdrawn from the field of measurement world, but exist more secretly, such as in the GPS system of automobiles. In addition, they even opened up new territory in the field of 3D animation.
In Everything is Count, mikael Lonai said: Every answer to a question gives birth to 10 new questions. Perhaps in the eyes of ordinary people, mathematics is already a highly developed discipline, but in mikael Lonai's eyes, there are still many unsolved mysteries in the field of mathematics, waiting for us to decipher.