Mathematics was developed
about 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians. They did this at the same time
as they developed reading and writing. However, the roots of mathematics
go back much more than 5,000 years.
Throughout their history, humans have faced the need to measure and communicate about time, quantity, and distance and mathematics is an aiding tool to achieve this.
Mathematics has been a part of the human search for understanding. Mathematical discoveries have come both from the attempt to describe the natural world and from the desire to arrive at a form of inescapable truth from careful reasoning. These remain fruitful and important motivations for mathematical thinking, but in the last century mathematics has been successfully applied to many other aspects of the human world: voting trends in politics, the dating of ancient artifacts, the analysis of automobile traffic patterns, and long-term strategies for the sustainable harvest of deciduous forests, to mention a few. Today, mathematics as a mode of thought and expression is more valuable than ever before. Learning to think in mathematical terms is an essential part of becoming a liberally educated person.
Throughout their history, humans have faced the need to measure and communicate about time, quantity, and distance and mathematics is an aiding tool to achieve this.
Mathematics has been a part of the human search for understanding. Mathematical discoveries have come both from the attempt to describe the natural world and from the desire to arrive at a form of inescapable truth from careful reasoning. These remain fruitful and important motivations for mathematical thinking, but in the last century mathematics has been successfully applied to many other aspects of the human world: voting trends in politics, the dating of ancient artifacts, the analysis of automobile traffic patterns, and long-term strategies for the sustainable harvest of deciduous forests, to mention a few. Today, mathematics as a mode of thought and expression is more valuable than ever before. Learning to think in mathematical terms is an essential part of becoming a liberally educated person.
The everyday use of arithmetic and the display of information
by means of graphs, are an everyday commonplace. These are the
elementary aspects of mathematics. Advanced mathematics is widely
used, but often in an unseen and unadvertised way.
- The mathematics of error-correcting codes is applied to CD players and to computers. The stunning pictures of far away planets sent by Voyager II could not have had their crispness and quality without such mathematics.
- Voyager's journey to the planets could not have been calculated without the mathematics of differential equations.
- Whenever it is said that advances are made with supercomputers, there has to be a mathematical theory which instructs the computer what is to be done, so allowing it to apply its capacity for speed and accuracy.
- The next generation of software requires the latest methods from what is called category theory, a theory of mathematical structures which has given new perspectives on the foundations of mathematics and on logic.
- The physical sciences (chemistry, physics, oceanography, astronomy) require mathematics for the development of their theories.
- In ecology, mathematics is used when studying the laws of population change.
- Statistics provides the theory and methodology for the analysis of wide varieties of data.
- Statistics is also essential in medicine, for analysing data on the causes of illness and on the utility of new drugs.
- Travel by aeroplane would not be possible without the mathematics of airflow and of control systems.
- Body scanners are the expression of subtle mathematics, discovered in the 19th century, which makes it possible to construct an image of the inside of an object from information on a number of single X-ray views of it.
Thus Mathematics is involved in matters of life and death.