g CONTENTS
Introduction
Mathematics has existed for as long as the human race has been observing and trying to understand the universe. The first historical uses were for measuring the the physical world, especially in astronomy, and for accounting purposes – in order to work out how much tax someone owed, the area of their fields had to be measured.
From these extremely practical origins, maths has grown into a much broader subject: from simple mensuration (calculating the areas and volumes of shapes) we have developed the field of geometry; from modelling the motion of planets in space we created calculus; from trying to solve simple equations we developed the basic ideas of number theory; and while trying to understand and describe the ...
Get Math 100 Ideas in 100 Words now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
