In prehistoric times, human beings have tried to measure abstract quantitative relations such as the quantity of matter and the length of time with natural laws. Chapter 5: Simulation and methodology of human intelligence such as time-year, month, day and time. Arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) will naturally occur. Ancient stone tablets also confirmed that humans had mastered certain geometric knowledge at that time. The oldest known mathematical tool is the bone of Le Pang Bo found in Mount Le Pombo, Swaziland, which is a relic of about 35,000 BC. That's a baboon's fibula, on which 29 different nicks were specially cut to count the number of women and the menstrual cycle of women. Similar cultural relics have been found in Africa and France, about 35,000 to 20,000 years ago, all related to quantitative time. Yixianggou bone was found in Yixianggou area on the northwest coast of Lake Edward, one of the sources of the Nile (located in Congo * * and the northeast of China), about 20,000 years ago, and it was engraved with three groups and a series of stripe symbols. The general interpretation of this symbol is the earliest known prime number sequence, and some people think it is a record representing six lunar months. Different prehistoric counting systems have also been found in other regions, such as Mu Fu or Chip, which were used to store data in the Inca Empire.
In geometry, geometric patterns represented by pictures appeared in the pre-dynasty period of ancient Egypt in 5000 BC. Designs incorporating geometric concepts, including circles, ellipses and Pythagoras ternary numbers, were also found in the megalithic cultural sites in England and Scotland around 3000 BC. From the beginning of the germination of mathematics, the main use of mathematics is to do tax and trade-related calculations, understand the relationship between numbers, measure land and predict astronomical events. These needs can be simply summarized as the study of quantity, structure, space and time.
After mankind entered the slave society, mathematics was further developed. Ancient China in the Yellow River valley, ancient Egypt in the lower Nile, Babylonia in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and ancient India in the Ganges River valley all played an important role in the development of mathematics. These countries have gradually mastered some mathematical knowledge on the basis of agricultural development, and many mathematical problems are based on the needs of agricultural measurement. Humans have gradually begun to form the initial mathematical concepts, such as natural numbers and fractions. Mastered the simplest geometric figures, such as squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, etc. , and some simple mathematical calculation knowledge began to appear, such as symbols, counting methods, calculation methods and so on.
The ancient Egyptians wrote on a piece of grass pressed with papyrus. Our understanding of ancient Egyptian mathematics is mainly based on two papyrus-Rhine papyrus and Moscow papyrus. Ancient Egypt used decimal notation. In ancient Egypt, Nile water flooded regularly. After long-term observation, it is found that the simultaneous appearance of Sirius and the sun is a sign that the Nile flood is coming, which happens every 365 days. So the ancient Egyptians made a calendar based on this discovery, stipulating 365 days as a year. So mathematics has been applied to astronomy, and it is far more than that. It is necessary to re-measure the land after the Nile flood. These geometric problems involve the area of fields, the volume of barns and the simple calculation method of pyramids, which makes the geometry of ancient Egypt originate and develop. [1] According to the current measurement results, it is found that the calculation error of the ancient Egyptian pyramids over two thousand BC is very small, which shows that the mathematics level of ancient Egypt is very high. The main body of Rhine papyrus consists of 84 problems, and Moscow papyrus contains 25 problems, most of which come from real life and must be solved in ancient Egyptian life. Therefore, there is no theoretical derivation of formulas, theorems and proofs in the book, and mathematics still stays at the perceptual level, which lays the foundation for the arrival of rational mathematics.
The understanding of ancient Babylonian mathematics is mainly based on Babylonian clay tablets. Of all the clay tablets found, 300 are mathematical documents and 200 are mathematical calculation tables. From these mathematical clay tablets, we can find that ancient Babylon had begun to use sexagesimal notation, and sexagesimal's music score appeared. Use the same rules as integers for calculation. [1] Moreover, ancient Babylon had tables about reciprocal, multiplication, square, cube, square root and cube root. With the help of the reciprocal table, division is often converted into multiplication for calculation. Babylonian mathematics has the characteristics of arithmetic and algebra, and geometry is only a way to express algebraic problems, and there is no theoretical concept of mathematics.
China has a long history. A large number of figures and inscriptions on stone tools, pottery, bronzes, tortoise shells and animal bones show that the concept of geometry was gradually formed in China as early as the Paleolithic. As early as five or six thousand years ago, there were mathematical symbols in ancient China. By the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago, numbers engraved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions or pottery were already very common. At this time, the natural number is counted in decimal. There are thirteen counting units in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, ranging from one to ten to hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands. This shows that the basic concepts of mathematics were also formed in ancient China.
The germination period is the initial accumulation period of mathematical knowledge and a gradual stage in the process of mathematical development. The mathematical knowledge in this period was scattered, preliminary and unsystematic, but it was the source of the history of mathematical development, which laid the foundation for the later development of mathematics.