Math and History!

 I found it very interesting how the ancient people of India came to develop the numerical system we all know and love today. Over the week where we watched and studied how ancient people all discovered their kind of mathematics generally around the same time. My first teachable is history so I always wonder why something is the way it is and now I happily know where many ideas of mathematics come from!

I generally found the whole history of mathematics interesting. The documentary allowed me to develop a different historical view on the times as opposed to what  I am used to studying. It is almost like I put "Math Lens" on to see how intertwined human history and maths are. We even unfortunately see this with the Chinese leader who used maths to determine when the best time to get an heir is. The funny thing is this makes perfect sense when you think about how important one's legacy was in the context of an ancient monarch/leader. It was cool to compare and contrast the ancient world’s idea of maths with my own idea of maths. The use of weighing objects with weights as a form of payment stood out to me as I was able to relate it to how we pay for things today. If the cost of an item is based on weight then the heavier something is, the more money it will cost. Today’s world we use the same method only in numerical terms to determine the cost of something. If it is a higher numerical value then the cost is higher. It is not really the same when acted out, however, it was a cool way I could relate to those current times of mathematics. Another cool thing was learning where our numerical system comes from. Seeing how the ancient world used 1-9 and then zero seemed to be non-existent. Only being there as a placeholder value. It was intriguing to watch how many doors in mathematics the idea of “zero” was able to open. 

It was also very interesting to see the history of maths in relation to the Greeks. I think it is interesting how fast maths developed in the ancient world and how powerful passing ideas along is. As one of the methods presented in the documentary we still use today. I think we can all remember in Grade 10 or 11 learning the pythagorean theorem and there was always a little history lesson before the lesson began. All in all, the most interesting thing I found from the documentary was seeing how different civilizations developed their own sense of mathematics.