Mathematical knowledge originated with the appearance of human civilization, and took the lead in starting a long process of primitive accumulation in several ancient civilizations. Our ancestors left us precious and original research materials. The most famous ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics papyrus and Babylonian cuneiform blackboard writing reflect the level of ancient Egyptian mathematics and Babi, and they are regarded as the representatives of early human mathematical knowledge accumulation. It is made by pressing the stems and skins of aquatic plants in the swamp of the Nile valley into papyrus rolls and writing them with natural pigment solution. There are two papyrus books that directly write mathematics content. One is called "Moscow papyrus", which comes from about 1850 BC and includes 25 mathematical problems. This papyrus book was bought by Goranev, a Russian, in 1893. It is also called Moscow Papyrus. Now it is in the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts. Another book, called Reint Papyrus Volume, was written around 1650 BC, with the words "A guide to all mysteries" at the beginning, followed by 85 mathematical problems copied by Amos from earlier documents. This papyrus was purchased by Reint of Glen in 1858, and was later collected by the museum. It is rich in content, and describes the ancient Egyptian notation, four integer operations, the unique usage of unit fraction, trial and error, the problem of finding the area and volume of geometric figures, and the application of mathematics in production and junior high school life. The ancient Babylonian blackboard writing was written on a wet clay tablet with a sharp weapon with a triangular cross section. Because the font is wedge-shaped, it is called wedge blackboard, starting from 650. As many as 500 thousand pieces of such clay tablets have been unearthed one after another. They belong to the end of Sumerian culture in 265,438+000 BC, the era of Hammurabi from 65,438+0790 BC to 65,438+0600 BC, the new Babylonian Empire from 600 BC to 300 AD, and the subsequent Persian and Celeside eras. Among them, about 300 to 400 pieces are mathematical clay tablets. People think that these mathematical tables are used to calculate and solve problems. These ancient clay tablets are now scattered in many museums all over the world and numbered one by one, which has become the most reliable information for us to study Babylonian mathematics. Babylonian mathematics is generally better than ancient Egyptian mathematics. Babylonians used the 60-base notation and worked out the reciprocal table, square table, cubic table, square root table and cubic root table. The square root of 2 is about 1.4 142 13. Babylonian algebra is quite advanced. They use language to describe equation problems and their solutions, and often use special words such as "length", "width" and "area" to represent unknowns. In addition to understanding quadratic and cubic equations, there are some problems of number theory. Babylonian Algebra They just collected some rules for calculating the area and volume of simple figures. Maybe they only did some geometry when solving practical problems. In addition, Babylonian mathematics has obvious application background in commerce, agriculture and astronomy. We can say that in the process of early human accumulation of mathematical knowledge, due to the need of counting objects, natural numbers were produced. With the appearance and development of notation, operations are gradually formed, which leads to the emergence of arithmetic. Due to the need of measuring objects, simple geometry came into being. With the development of agriculture, architecture, handicrafts and astronomical observation, the empirical knowledge about their basic properties and relationships has gradually accumulated, so geometry has sprouted. Due to the needs of commercial computing, engineering computing and astronomy, the basic knowledge of algebra is gradually accumulated on the basis of arithmetic computing skills. However, at this stage, until the 6th century BC, we could not find what we call "rational mathematics" today, but only a primary "empirical mathematics".

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