MATH 381 Assignment 1 An,Xingyue 20034032

Question 5:

Talking about the role of mysticism in the development of mathematics, the first idea that

came into my mind is Guru Nanak, who was the founder of mysticism. Guru Nanak

stressed that “God must be seen with 'the inward eye', or the 'heart', of a human being.”

Mysticism comes from the ancient Greek word "μύω múō,”- and it means "close your

mouth and eyes". ,that is “guided into the mysterious cult”. The basic belief of mysticism

is that the secret or hidden natural force is really existed in the world and people who

want to understand or operate this mysterious force must be educated in mysterious

knowledge first.

When it comes to mysticism, Pythagoras has to be mentioned, he was a famous

mathematician and philosopher in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC. He founded a

mystic school that combines the trinity of politics, academia and religion: the Pythagorean

school. The famous proposition of his school is “ Everything in the world can be

numbered”, and the relations between things could be expressed numerically. Also they

identified science with mathematics, maintaining that all things are made up of numbers

and geometrical figures.

The Pythagoras School has made many outstanding contributions to the development of

mathematics, for instance, the classification of numbers.They made a distinction between

odd number and even number but at that time, the number 2 has not been considered as

an even number. Of course, the most remarkable finding of Pythagoras is Pythagorean

Theorem which played an important role in the fields if geometry, number theory, algebra

and analytic geometry. The discovery of "Pythagorean theorem” meant mathematical

propositions could represent the proportional relationship of things independently, but not

depend on geometric figures.

Another remarkable contribution of Pythagorean school was the irrational number √2.

Hippasus was a member of Pythagorean school and he considered a question “What is

the diagonal length of a square with a side length of 1?” He found that this length of the

diagonal could not be expressed in integers or fractions. The discovery of Hippasus led to

the birth of the first irrational number √2 in the history of mathematics. However, the

emergence of √2 set off a huge storm in the mathematical world at that time, which was

called “the first mathematical crisis”. It not only directly affected the Pythagorean school’s

mathematical beliefs but also shocked to the ideas of all ancient Greeks. For a while,

Pythagoreans treated the discovery as an official secret, and poor Hippasus was thrown

into the sea for this “heresy”. Until 1872, the German mathematician Dedkin used the

"segmentation of rational numbers" to define irrational numbers and established the

theory of real numbers.

In conclusion, mysticism plays an important role in mathematics and promotes the the

development of mathematics.

Reference:

Introduction to mysticism http://m.86lsw.com/bjzx/158.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism

http://mystic-minds.net/blog/pythagoras/

https://www.math.tamu.edu/~don.allen/history/pythag/pythag.html