Mathematics is an exact science that we begin to learn at school. Then we find its application in everyday life as well, from the banal calculation of the amount of purchases in the store to the use of high-tech objects, the creation of which would be impossible without complex and precise calculations.
The most interesting facts about mathematics
Like any other science, there have been a huge number of important and useful discoveries made in mathematics, so we can tell you many interesting facts.
Mathematics as a science originated as early as 2000 years ago, and there are certainly a lot of interesting things to tell you about it. Let’s highlight a few sections with facts about mathematics:
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About the numbers
In Arabic, the word “number” means “zero,” but so historically, this word now refers to all numbers.
666 is the most mystical and covered with legends. The sum of all the numbers in the game roulette is 666, and in the European Parliament there is a chair with this number, but according to a long tradition, no one sits on it.
The Chinese do not like to use the number 4, as it is pronounced “death” in their language.
Arabic numeralsArabic numerals.
Negative numbers were almost never used until the 19th century, when they were invented by the Italian merchant Pisano to record his debts.
In Thai, the number 5 is pronounced “ha,” and 555 is a slang phrase for laughter.
Italians don’t like the number 17, because even in ancient Rome they wrote the phrase “I am no more” on tombstones, which visually looked like VIXI (the numbers 6 and 11, the sum of which equals 17).
Facts from the life of mathematicians
Sophia Kovalevskaya became interested in the exact science when she was a child. It was encouraged by the fact that due to lack of money her parents pasted the walls of her room not with wallpaper, but with lecture notes on mathematics. In adulthood Sofia had to arrange a fake marriage to study mathematics, because in Russia at that time women were forbidden to engage in science, and her father was against his daughter’s departure abroad.
Sophia KovalevskayaSophia Kovalevskaya
The first woman mathematician in history is recognized as a Greek woman named Hypatia, who lived in Egyptian Alexandria in the 5th century AD.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a little-known British mathematician, but he became famous throughout the world as a writer under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
One day the American mathematician George Danzig, while still a student, was late for a lecture and mistook the equations written on the board for his homework. With great difficulty the future scientist coped with them, and later it turned out that these were two “unsolvable” problems in statistics, on which several scientists had been working for years.
Genius of our time Stephen Hawking once shared that he studied mathematics only in school. And when he taught at Oxford, he simply read a textbook designed for students several chapters ahead of time.
Stephen HawkingSteven Hawking
One of the most enigmatic mathematicians is Euclid. The fact is that much is known about his writings, but almost nothing is known about him himself: neither the exact date of birth, nor the date of death, nor other details of his biography. Only that he lived in Alexandria around the 3rd century BC.
Interesting things from the history of mathematics
The oldest mathematical work was found in Swaziland (South Africa). It was a baboon bone, on which were stamped dashes for counting. The bone is estimated by scientists to be about 37,000 years old.
The first mathematical notations in the form of groups of prime numbers were also inscribed on the bone, now about 19 thousand years old.
Bones with inscribed “numbers “Bones with inscribed “numbers
People have been counting since ancient times. Firstly on fingers, then using improvised materials (stones, branches), and then invented to knot on ropes.
In 1897, the state of Indiana in the United States issued a bill which legally set the value of Pi equal to 3.2 (instead of the commonly accepted 3.14). But thanks to the timely intervention of a local university professor, the bill never became law.
Applications of mathematics to human life
In addition to scientists and inventors who use the postulates of this fundamental science in their work, people in other occupations not associated with science also frequently rely on mathematical calculations in their daily lives.
For example, when filling up a car, we multiply the cost of a liter of gasoline by the desired volume and obtain the amount to be paid. When we go shopping in a store, calculating whether we have enough money in our wallet or on our bank card account, we begin to estimate the total cost of goods by adding up their prices.