The history of mathematics reaches back to prehistory, when early humans found ways to count and quantify things. In doing so, they began to identify certain patterns and rules in the concepts of numbers, sizes, and shapes. They discovered the basic principles of addition and subtraction—for example, that two things (whether pebbles, berries, or mammoths) when added to another two invariably resulted in four things. While such ideas may seem obvious to us today, they were profound insights for their time. They also demonstrate that the history of mathematics is above all a story of discovery rather than invention. Although it was human curiosity and intuition that recognized the underlying principles of mathematics, and human ingenuity that later provided various means of recording and notating them, those principles themselves are not a human invention. The fact that 2 + 2 = 4 is true, independent of human existence; the rules of mathematics, like the laws of physics, are universal, eternal, and unchanging. When mathematicians first showed that the angles of any triangle in a flat plane when added together come to 180°, a straight line, this was not their invention: they had simply discovered a fact that had always been (and will always be) true.
0 comments:
Post a Comment