ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 2

GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 3

The Story of Maths. The Language of the Universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb0MSMGSIeY
(The Mathematics of the Ancient Civilizations)

Our world is made up of patterns and sequences. They're all around us.

Day becomes night. Animals travel across the earth in ever changing
formations.

Landscapes are constantly altering. One of the reasons Mathematics

began was because we needed to find a way of making sense of these natural
patterns. The most basic concepts of maths - space and quantity - are hard-
wired into our brains.

Even animals have a sense of distance and number, assessing when

their pack is outnumbered, and whether to fight or fly, calculating whether
their prey is within striking distance. Understanding maths is the difference
between life and death. But it was man who took these basic concepts and
started to build upon these foundations.

At some point, humans started to spot patterns, to make connections,

to count and to order the world around them. With this, a whole new
mathematical universe began to emerge.

This is the River Nile. It's been the lifeline of Egypt for millennia. I've
come here because it's where some of the first signs of mathematics as we
know it today emerged. People abandoned nomadic life and began settling
here as early as 6000BC.

The conditions were perfect for farming. The most important event for
Egyptian agriculture each year was the flooding of the Nile. So this was used
as a marker to start each new year. Egyptians did record what was going on
over periods of time, so in order to establish a calendar like this, you need to
count how many days, for example, happened in-between lunar phases, or
how many days happened in-between two floodings of the Nile.

Recording the patterns for the seasons was essential, not only to their
management of the land, but also their religion. The ancient Egyptians who
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settled on the Nile banks believed it was the river god, Hapi, who flooded the
river each year.

And in return for the life-giving water, the citizens offered a portion of
the yield as a thanksgiving. As settlements grew larger, it became necessary
to find ways to administer them. Areas of land needed to be calculated, crop
yields predicted, taxes charged and collated.

In short, people needed to count and measure. The Egyptians used their
bodies to measure the world, and it's how their units of measurements
evolved. A palm was the width of a hand, a cubit an arm length from elbow to
fingertips. Land cubits, strips of land measuring a cubit by 100, were used by
the pharaoh's surveyors to calculate areas.

There's a very strong link between bureaucracy and the development of

Mathematics in ancient Egypt. And we can see this link right from the
beginning, from the invention of the number system, throughout Egyptian
history, really.

For the Old Kingdom, the only evidence we have are metrological
systems, that is measurements for areas, for length. This points to a
bureaucratic need to develop such things. It was vital to know the area of a
farmer's land so he could be taxed accordingly.

Or if the Nile robbed him of part of his land, so he could request a

rebate. It meant that the pharaoh's surveyors were often calculating
the area of irregular parcels of land. It was the need to solve such practical
problems that made them the earliest mathematical innovators.

The Egyptians needed some way to record the results of their

calculations.

Amongst all the hieroglyphs that cover the tourist souvenirs scattered
around Cairo, I was on the hunt for those that recorded some of the first
numbers in history. They were difficult to track down. But I did find them in
the end.

The Egyptians were using a decimal system, motivated by the 10

fingers on our hands. The sign for one was a stroke, 10, a heel bone, 100, a
coil of rope, and 1,000, a Lotus plant.
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The hieroglyphs are beautiful, but the Egyptian number system was
fundamentally flawed. They had no concept of a place value, so in one stroke
could only represent one unit, not 100 or 1,000. Although you can write a
million with just one character, rather than the seven that we use, if you
want to write a million minus one, then the poor old Egyptian scribe has got
to write nine strokes, nine heel bones, nine coils of rope, and so on, a total of
54 characters. Despite the drawback of this number system, the Egyptians
were brilliant problem solvers. We know this because of the few records that
have survived.

The Egyptian scribes used sheets of papyrus to record their

mathematical discoveries. This delicate material made from reeds decayed
over time and many secrets perished with it. But there's one revealing
document that has survived.

Scribes were the few Egyptians who knew how to read and write. The
job of a scribe were to record in writing the everyday life and
extraordinary happenings in ancient Egypt

.
The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus is the most important document we
have today for Egyptian mathematics. We get a good overview of what types
of problems the Egyptians would have dealt with in their mathematics. We
also get explicitly stated how multiplications and divisions were carried out.

The papyri show how to multiply two large numbers together. But to
illustrate the method, let's take two smaller numbers.

Let's do three times six. The scribe would take the first number, three,
and put it in one column. In the second column, he would place the number
one. Then he would double the numbers in each column, so three becomes
six.....and six would become 12. And then in the second column, one would
become two, and two becomes four. Now, here's the really clever bit. The
scribe wants to multiply three by six. So he takes the powers of two in the
second column, which add up to six. That's two plus four. Then he moves
back to the first column, and just takes those rows corresponding to the two
and the four. So that's six and the 12. He adds those together to get the
answer of 18. But for me, the most striking thing about this method is that
the scribe has effectively written that second number in binary. Six is one lot
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of four, one lot of two, and no units. Which is 1-1-0. The Egyptians have
understood the power of binary over 3,000 years before the mathematician
and philosopher Leibniz would reveal their potential.

Today, the whole technological world depends on the same principles

that were used in ancient Egypt. The Rhind Papyrus was recorded by a scribe
called Ahmes around 1650BC. Its problems are concerned with finding
solutions to everyday situations. Several of the problems mention bread and
beer, which isn't surprising as Egyptian workers were paid in food and drink.
One is concerned with how to divide nine loaves equally between 10 people,
without a fight breaking out.

I've got nine loaves of bread here. I'm gonna take five of them and cut
them into halves. Of course, nine people could shave a 10th off their loaf
and give the pile of crumbs to the 10th person. But the Egyptians developed a
far more elegant solution - take the next four and divide those into thirds. But
two of the thirds I am now going to cut into fifths, so each piece will be one
fifteenth. Each person then gets one half and one third and one fifteenth. It is
through such seemingly practical problems that we start to see a more
abstract mathematics developing.

Suddenly, new numbers are on the scene - fractions - and it isn't too
long before the Egyptians are exploring the mathematics of these numbers.
Fractions are clearly of practical importance to anyone dividing quantities for
trade in the market. To log these transactions, the Egyptians developed
notation which recorded these new numbers. One of the earliest
representations of these fractions came from a hieroglyph which had great
mystical significance. It's called the Eye of Horus. Horus was an Old Kingdom
god, depicted as half man, half falcon. According to legend, Horus' father was
killed by his other son, Seth. Horus was determined to avenge the murder.

During one particularly fierce battle, Seth ripped out Horus' eye, tore it
up and scattered it over Egypt. But the gods were looking favourably on
Horus. They gathered up the scattered pieces and reassembled the eye.

Each part of the eye represented a different fraction. Each one, half the
fraction before. Although the original eye represented a whole unit, the
reassembled eye is 1/64 short. Although the Egyptians stopped at 1/64,
implicit in this picture is the possibility of adding more fractions, halving them
each time, the sum getting closer and closer to one, but never quite reaching
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it. This is the first hint of something called a geometric series, and it appears
at a number of points in the Rhind Papyrus. But the concept of infinite series
would remain hidden until the mathematicians of Asia discovered it centuries
later. Having worked out a system of numbers, including these new fractions,
it was time for the Egyptians to apply their knowledge to understanding
shapes that they encountered day to day.

These shapes were rarely regular squares or rectangles, and in the

Rhind Papyrus, we find the area of a more organic form, the circle. What is
astounding in the calculation of the area of the circle is its exactness, really.
How they would have found their method is open to speculation, because the
texts we have do not show us the methods how they were found.

This calculation is particularly striking because it depends on seeing how

the shape of the circle can be approximated by shapes that the Egyptians
already understood. The Rhind Papyrus states that a circular field with a
diameter of nine units is close in area to a square with sides of eight. But
how would this relationship have been discovered?

My favourite theory sees the answer in the ancient game of mancala.

Mancala boards were found carved on the roofs of temples. Each player starts
with an equal number of stones, and the object of the game is to move them
round the board, capturing your opponent's counters on the way. As the
players sat around waiting to make their next move, perhaps one of them
realised that sometimes the balls fill the circular holes of the mancala board
in a rather nice way.

He might have gone on to experiment with trying to make larger circles.

Perhaps he noticed that 64 stones, the square of 8, can be used to make a
circle with diameter nine stones. By rearranging the stones, the circle has
been approximated by a square.

And because the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared, the
Egyptian calculation gives us the first accurate value for pi. The area of
the circle is 64. Divide this by the radius squared, in this case 4.5 squared,
and you get a value for pi. So 64 divided by 4.5 squared is 3.16, just a little
under two hundredths away from its true value. But the really brilliant thing
is, the Egyptians are using these smaller shapes to capture the larger shape.

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But there's one imposing and majestic symbol of Egyptian mathematics

we haven't attempted to unravel yet - The pyramid.

I've seen so many pictures that I couldn't believe I'd be impressed by

them. But meeting them face to face, you understand why they're called one
of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They're simply breath taking.
And how much more impressive they must have been in their day, when the
sides were as smooth as glass, reflecting the desert sun. To me it looks like
there might be mirror pyramids hiding underneath the desert, which would
complete the shapes to make perfectly symmetrical octahedrons. Sometimes,
in the shimmer of the desert heat, you can almost see these shapes.

It's the hint of symmetry hidden inside these shapes that makes them
so impressive for a mathematician. The pyramids are just a little short to
create these perfect shapes, but some have suggested another important
mathematical concept might be hidden inside the proportions of the Great
Pyramid - the golden ratio. Two lengths are in the golden ratio, if the
relationship of the longest to the shortest is the same as the sum of the two
to the longest side. Such a ratio has been associated with the perfect
proportions one finds all over the natural world, as well as in the work of
artists, architects and designers for millennia.

Whether the architects of the pyramids were conscious of this important

mathematical idea, or were instinctively drawn to it because of its satisfying
aesthetic properties, we'll never know. For me, the most impressive thing
about the pyramids is the mathematical brilliance that went into making
them, including the first inkling of one of the great theorems of the ancient
world, Pythagoras' theorem.

In order to get perfect right-angled corners on their buildings and

pyramids, the Egyptians would have used a rope with knots tied in it. At some
point, the Egyptians realised that if they took a triangle with sides marked
with three knots, four knots and five knots, it guaranteed them a perfect
right-angle. This is because three squared, plus four squared, is equal to five
squared. So we've got a perfect Pythagorean triangle. In fact any triangle
whose sides satisfy this relationship will give me an 90-degree angle.

But I'm pretty sure that the Egyptians hadn't got this sweeping
generalisation of their 3, 4, 5 triangle. We would not expect to find the
general proof because this is not the style of Egyptian mathematics. Every
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problem was solved using concrete numbers and then if a verification would
be carried out at the end, it would use the result and these concrete, given
numbers, there's no general proof within the Egyptian mathematical texts. It
would be some 2,000 years before the Greeks and Pythagoras would prove
that all right-angled triangles shared certain properties.

This wasn't the only mathematical idea that the Egyptians would
anticipate. In a 4,000-year-old document called the Moscow papyrus, we find
a formula for the volume of a pyramid with its peak sliced off, which shows
the first hint of calculus at work.

For a culture like Egypt that is famous for its pyramids, you would
expect problems like this to have been a regular feature within the
mathematical texts. The calculation of the volume of a truncated pyramid is
one of the most advanced bits, according to our modern standards of
mathematics, that we have from ancient Egypt.

The architects and engineers would certainly have wanted such a

formula to calculate the amount of materials required to build it.But it's a
mark of the sophistication of Egyptian mathematics that they were able to
produce such a beautiful method.

To understand how they derived their formula, start with a pyramid

built such that the highest point sits directly over one corner. Three of these
can be put together to make a rectangular box, so the volume of the skewed
pyramid is a third the volume of the box. That is, the height, times the length,
times the width, divided by three. Now comes an argument which shows the
very first hints of the calculus at work, thousands of years before Gottfried
Leibniz and Isaac Newton would come up with the theory.

Suppose you could cut the pyramid into slices, you could then slide the
layers across to make the more symmetrical pyramid you see in Giza.
However, the volume of the pyramid has not changed, despite the
rearrangement of the layers. So the same formula works.

The Egyptians were amazing innovators, and their ability to generate

new mathematics was staggering. For me, they revealed the power of
geometry and numbers, and made the first moves towards some of the
exciting mathematical discoveries to come.

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But there was another civilisation that had mathematics to rival that of
Egypt. And we know much more about their achievements. This is Damascus,
over 5,000 years old, and still vibrant and bustling today. It used to be the
most important point on the trade routes, linking old Mesopotamia with Egypt.
The Babylonians controlled much of modern-day Iraq, Iran and Syria, from
1800BC. In order to expand and run their empire, they became masters of
managing and manipulating numbers. We have law codes for instance that tell
us about the way society is ordered.

The people we know most about are the scribes, the professionally
literate and numerate people who kept the records for the wealthy families
and for the temples and palaces. Scribe schools existed from around 2500BC.
Aspiring scribes were sent there as children, and learned how to read, write
and work with numbers. Scribe records were kept on clay tablets, which
allowed the Babylonians to manage and advance their empire. However,
many of the tablets we have today aren't official documents, but children's
exercises.

It's these unlikely relics that give us a rare insight into how the
Babylonians approached mathematics. So, this is a geometrical textbook from
about the 18th century BC. I hope you can see that there are lots of pictures
on it. And underneath each picture is a text that sets a problem about the
picture. So for instance this one here says, I drew a square, 60 units long,
and inside it, I drew four circles - what are their areas? This little tablet here
was written 1,000 years at least later than the tablet here, but has a very
interesting relationship.

It also has four circles on, in a square, roughly drawn, but this isn't a
textbook, it's a school exercise.

The adult scribe who's teaching the student is being given this as an
example of completed homework or something like that. Like the Egyptians,
the Babylonians appeared interested in solving practical problems to do with
measuring and weighing. The Babylonian solutions to these problems are
written like Mathematical recipes. A scribe would simply follow and record a
set of instructions to get a result. Here's an example of the kind of problem
they'd solve. I've got a bundle of cinnamon sticks here, but I'm not gonna
weigh them.

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Instead, I'm gonna take four times their weight and add them to the
scales. Now I'm gonna add 20 gin. Gin was the ancient Babylonian measure
of weight. I'm gonna take half of everything here and then add it again...
That's two bundles, and ten gin. Everything on this side is equal to one mana.
One mana was 60 gin. And here, we have one of the first mathematical
equations in history, everything on this side is equal to one mana. But how
much does the bundle of cinnamon sticks weigh?

Without any algebraic language, they were able to manipulate the

quantities to be able to prove that the cinnamon sticks weighed five gin. In
my mind, it's this kind of problem which gives mathematics a bit of a bad
name. You can blame those ancient Babylonians for all those tortuous
problems you had at school. But the ancient Babylonian scribes excelled at
this kind of problem.

Intriguingly, they weren't using powers of 10, like the Egyptians, they
were using powers of 60. The Babylonians invented their number system, like
the Egyptians, by using their fingers. But instead of counting through the 10
fingers on their hand, Babylonians found a more intriguing way to count body
parts. They used the 12 knuckles on one hand, and the five fingers on the
other to be able to count 12 times 5, that is 60 different numbers. So for
example, this number would have been 2 lots of 12, 24, and then, 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, to make 29. The number 60 had another powerful property.

It can be perfectly divided in a multitude of ways. Here are 60 beans. I

can arrange them in 2 rows of 30. 3 rows of 20. 4 rows of 15. 5 rows of 12.
Or 6 rows of 10. The divisibility of 60 makes it a perfect base in which to do
arithmetic. The base 60 system was so successful, we still use elements of it
today.

Every time we want to tell the time, we recognise units of 60 - 60

seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. But the most important feature
of the Babylonians' number system was that it recognised place value. Just
as our decimal numbers count how many lots of tens, hundreds and
thousands you're recording, the position of each Babylonian number records
the power of 60.

Instead of inventing new symbols for bigger and bigger numbers, they
would write 1-1-1, so this number would be 3,661. The catalyst for this
discovery was the Babylonians' desire to chart the course of the night sky.
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The Babylonians' calendar was based on the cycles of the moon. They needed
a way of recording astronomically large numbers. Month by month, year by
year, these cycles were recorded.

From about 800BC, there were complete lists of lunar eclipses. The
Babylonian system of measurement was quite sophisticated at that time.
They had a system of angular measurement, 360 degrees in a full circle,
each degree was divided into 60 minutes, a minute was further divided into
60 seconds. So they had a regular system for measurement, and it was in
perfect harmony with their number system, so it's well suited not only for
observation but also for calculation. But in order to calculate and cope with
these large numbers, the Babylonians needed to invent a new symbol.

And in so doing, they prepared the ground for one of the great
breakthroughs in the history of mathematics - zero. In the early days, the
Babylonians, in order to mark an empty place in the middle of a number,
would simply leave a blank space. So they needed a way of representing
nothing in the middle of a number. So they used a sign, as a sort of
breathing marker, a punctuation mark, and it comes to mean zero in the
middle of a number.

This was the first time zero, in any form, had appeared in the
mathematical universe. But it would be over a 1,000 years before this little
place holder would become a number in its own right. Having established
such a sophisticated system of numbers, they harnessed it to tame the arid
and inhospitable land that ran through Mesopotamia.

Babylonian engineers and surveyors found ingenious ways of accessing

water, and channelling it to the crop fields. Yet again, they used mathematics
to come up with solutions. The Orontes valley in Syria is still an agricultural
hub, and the old methods of irrigation are being exploited today, just as they
were thousands of years ago. Many of the problems in Babylonian
mathematics are concerned with measuring land, and it's here we see for the
first time the use of quadratic equations, one of the greatest legacies of
Babylonian mathematics. Quadratic equations involve things where the
unknown quantity you're trying to identify is multiplied by itself.

We call this squaring because it gives the area of a square, and it's in
the context of calculating the area of land that these quadratic equations

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naturally arise. Here's a typical problem. If a field has an area of 55 units

and one side is six units longer than the other, how long is the shorter side?

The Babylonian solution was to reconfigure the field as a square. Cut

three units off the end and move this round. Now, there's a three-by-three
piece missing, so let's add this in. The area of the field has increased by nine
units. This makes the new area 64. So the sides of the square are eight units.
The problem-solver knows that they've added three to this side.
So, the original length must be five.

It may not look like it, but this is one of the first quadratic equations in
history. In modern mathematics, I would use the symbolic language of
algebra to solve this problem. The amazing feat of the Babylonians is that
they were using these geometric games to find the value, without any
recourse to symbols or formulas. The Babylonians were enjoying problem-
solving for its own sake. They were falling in love with mathematics. The
Babylonians' fascination with numbers soon found a place in their leisure
time, too.

They were avid game-players. The Babylonians and their descendants

have been playing a version of backgammon for over 5,000 years. The
Babylonians played board games, from very posh board games in royal tombs
to little bits of board games found in schools, to board games scratched on
the entrances of palaces, so that the guardsman must have played when they
were bored, and they used dice to move their counters round.

People who played games were using numbers in their leisure time to
try and outwit their opponent, doing mental arithmetic very fast, and so they
were calculating in their leisure time, without even thinking about it as being
mathematical hard work.

Now's my chance. 'I hadn't played backgammon for ages but I reckoned
my maths would give me a fighting chance.' It's up to you.Six... I need to
move something.

'But it wasn't as easy as I thought.'Ah! What the hell was that?

Yeah.This is one, this is two. Now you're in trouble. So I can't move
anything. You cannot move these. Oh, gosh. There you go. Three
and four.

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'Just like the ancient Babylonians, my opponents were masters of

tactical mathematics.' Yeah. Put it there. Good game.

The Babylonians are recognised as one of the first cultures to use

symmetrical mathematical shapes to make dice, but there is more heated
debates about whether they might also have been the first to discover the
secrets of another important shape. The right-angled triangle.

We've already seen how the Egyptians use a 3-4-5 right-angled

triangle. But what the Babylonians knew about this shape and others like it is
much more sophisticated. This is the most famous and controversial ancient
tablet we have. It's called Plimpton 322.

Many mathematicians are convinced it shows the Babylonians could well

have known the principle regarding right-angled triangles, that the square on
the diagonal is the sum of the squares on the sides, and known it centuries
before the Greeks claimed it.

This is a copy of arguably the most famous Babylonian tablet, which is

Plimpton 322, and these numbers here reflect the width or height of a
triangle, this being the diagonal, the other side would be over here, and the
square of this column plus the square of the number in this column equals the
square of the diagonal.

They are arranged in an order of steadily decreasing angle, on a very

uniform basis, showing that somebody had a lot of understanding of how the
numbers fit together.

Here were 15 perfect Pythagorean triangles, all of whose sides had

whole-number lengths. It's tempting to think that the Babylonians were the
first custodians of Pythagoras' theorem, and it's a conclusion that generations
of historians have been seduced by.

But there could be a much simpler explanation for the sets of three
numbers which fulfil Pythagoras' theorem. It's not a systematic explanation of
Pythagorean triples, it's simply a mathematics teacher doing some quite
complicated calculations, but in order to produce some very simple numbers,
in order to set his students problems about right-angled triangles, and in that
sense it's about Pythagorean triples only incidentally.

The most valuable clues to what they understood could lie elsewhere.
This small school exercise tablet is nearly 4,000 years old and reveals just
what the Babylonians did know about right-angled triangles.

It uses a principle of Pythagoras' theorem to find the value of an

astounding new number. Drawn along the diagonal is a really very good
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approximation to the square root of two, and so that shows us that it was
known and used in school environments.

Why's this important? Because the square root of two is what we now
call an irrational number, that is, if we write it out in decimals, or even in
sexigesimal places, it doesn't end, the numbers go on forever after the
decimal point.

The implications of this calculation are far-reaching. Firstly, it means the

Babylonians knew something of Pythagoras' theorem 1,000 years before
Pythagoras.

Secondly, the fact that they can calculate this number to an accuracy of
four decimal places shows an amazing arithmetic facility, as well as a passion
for mathematical detail.

The Babylonians' mathematical dexterity was astounding, and for nearly

2,000 years they spearheaded intellectual progress in the ancient world. But
when their imperial power began to wane, so did their intellectual vigour.

By 330BC, the Greeks had advanced their imperial reach into old
Mesopotamia. This is Palmyra in central Syria, a once-great city built by the
Greeks. The mathematical expertise needed to build structures with such
geometric perfection is impressive.

Just like the Babylonians before them, the Greeks were passionate about
mathematics. The Greeks were clever colonists. They took the best from the
civilisations they invaded to advance their own power and influence, but they
were soon making contributions themselves.

In my opinion, their greatest innovation was to do with a shift in the

mind. What they initiated would influence humanity for centuries.
They gave us the power of proof. Somehow they decided that they had to
have a deductive system for their mathematics and the typical deductive
system was to begin with certain axioms, which you assume are true.

It's as if you assume a certain theorem is true without proving it. And
then, using logical methods and very careful steps, from these axioms you
prove theorems and from those theorems you prove more theorems, and it
just snowballs.

Proof is what gives mathematics its strength. It's the power or proof
which means that the discoveries of the Greeks are as true today as they
were 2,000 years ago. I needed to head west into the heart of the old Greek
empire to learn more.

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For me, Greek mathematics has always been heroic and romantic. I'm
on my way to Samos, less than a mile from the Turkish coast. This place has
become synonymous with the birth of Greek mathematics, and it's down to
the legend of one man.

His name is Pythagoras. The legends that surround his life and work
have contributed to the celebrity status he has gained over the last 2,000
years.

He's credited, rightly or wrongly, with beginning the transformation

from mathematics as a tool for accounting to the analytic subject we
recognise today.

Pythagoras is a controversial figure. Because he left no mathematical

writings, many have questioned whether he indeed solved any of the
theorems attributed to him.

He founded a school in Samos in the sixth century BC, but his teachings
were considered suspect and the Pythagoreans a bizarre sect.
There is good evidence that there were schools of Pythagoreans, and they
may have looked more like sects than what we associate with philosophical
schools, because they didn't just share knowledge, they also shared a way of
life.

There may have been communal living and they all seemed to have
been involved in the politics of their cities. One feature that makes them
unusual in the ancient world is that they included women.

But Pythagoras is synonymous with understanding something that

eluded the Egyptians and the Babylonians -the properties of right-angled
triangles.

What's known as Pythagoras' theorem states that if you take any right-
angled triangle, build squares on all the sides, then the area of the largest
square is equal to the sum of the squares on the two smaller sides.

It's at this point for me that mathematics is born and a gulf opens up
between the other sciences, and the proof is as simple as it is devastating in
its implications.

Place four copies of the right-angled triangle on top of this surface. The
square that you now see has sides equal to the hypotenuse of the triangle. By
sliding these triangles around, we see how we can break the area of the large
square up into the sum of two smaller squares, whose sides are given by the
two short sides of the triangle.

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In other words, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the
squares on the other sides. Pythagoras' theorem. It illustrates one of the
characteristic themes of Greek mathematics - the appeal to beautiful
arguments in geometry rather than a reliance on number.

Pythagoras may have fallen out of favour and many of the discoveries
accredited to him have been contested recently, but there's one mathematical
theory that I'm loath to take away from him. It's to do with music and the
discovery of the harmonic series.

The story goes that, walking past a blacksmith's one day, Pythagoras
heard anvils being struck, and noticed how the notes being produced sounded
in perfect harmony. He believed that there must be some rational explanation
to make sense of why the notes sounded so appealing. The answer was
mathematics.

Experimenting with a stringed instrument, Pythagoras discovered that

the intervals between harmonious musical notes were always represented as
whole-number ratios. And here's how he might have constructed his theory.

First, play a note on the open string. Next, take half the length. The
note almost sounds the same as the first note. In fact it's an octave higher,
but the relationship is so strong, we give these notes the same name. Now
take a third the length. We get another note which sounds harmonious next
to the first two, but take a length of string which is not in a whole-number
ratio and all we get is dissonance.

According to legend, Pythagoras was so excited by this discovery that

he concluded the whole universe was built from numbers. But he and his
followers were in for a rather unsettling challenge to their world view and it
came about as a result of the theorem which bears Pythagoras' name.

Legend has it, one of his followers, a mathematician called Hippasus,

set out to find the length of the diagonal for a right-angled triangle with two
sides measuring one unit. Pythagoras' theorem implied that the length of the
diagonal was a number whose square was two.

The Pythagoreans assumed that the answer would be a fraction, but

when Hippasus tried to express it in this way, no matter how he tried, he
couldn't capture it. Eventually he realised his mistake.

It was the assumption that the value was a fraction at all which was
wrong. The value of the square root of two was the number that the
Babylonians etched into the Yale tablet. However, they didn't recognise the
special character of this number. But Hippasus did. It was an irrational
number.
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The discovery of this new number, and others like it, is akin to an
explorer discovering a new continent, or a naturalist finding a new species.
But these irrational numbers didn't fit the Pythagorean world view. Later
Greek commentators tell the story of how Pythagoras swore his sect to
secrecy, but Hippasus let slip the discovery and was promptly drowned for his
attempts to broadcast their research.

But these mathematical discoveries could not be easily suppressed.

Schools of philosophy and science started to flourish all over Greece, building
on these foundations. The most famous of these was the Academy.

Plato founded this school in Athens in 387 BC. Although we think of him
today as a philosopher, he was one of mathematics' most important patrons.
Plato was enraptured by the Pythagorean world view and considered
mathematics the bedrock of knowledge.
Some people would say that Plato is the most influential figure for our
perception of Greek mathematics.

He argued that mathematics is an important form of knowledge and

does have a connection with reality. So by knowing mathematics, we know
more about reality.

In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato proposes the thesis that geometry is the
key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, a view still held by scientists
today. Indeed, the importance Plato attached to geometry is encapsulated in
the sign that was mounted above the Academy, "Let no-one ignorant of
geometry enter here."

Plato proposed that the universe could be crystallised into five regular
symmetrical shapes. These shapes, which we now call the Platonic solids,
were composed of regular polygons, assembled to create three-dimensional
symmetrical objects. The tetrahedron represented fire. The icosahedron,
made from 20 triangles, represented water. The stable cube was Earth. The
eight-faced octahedron was air. And the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron,
made out of 12 pentagons, was reserved for the shapethat captured Plato's
view of the universe.

Plato's theory would have a seismic influence and continued to inspire

mathematicians and astronomers for over 1,500 years. In addition to the
breakthroughs made in the Academy, mathematical triumphs were also
emerging from the edge of the Greek empire, and owed as much to the
mathematical heritage of the Egyptians as the Greeks.

Alexandria became a hub of academic excellence under the rule of the

Ptolemies in the 3rd century BC, and its famous library soon gained a
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reputation to rival Plato's academy. The kings of Alexandria were prepared to

invest in the arts and culture, in technology, mathematics, grammar, because
patronage for cultural pursuits was one way of showing that you were a more
prestigious ruler, and had a better entitlement to greatness.

The old library and its precious contents were destroyed when the
Muslims conquered Egypt in the 7th Century. But its spirit is alive in a new
building. Today, the library remains a place of discovery and scholarship.
Mathematicians and philosophers flocked to Alexandria, driven by their thirst
for knowledge and the pursuit of excellence.

The patrons of the library were the first professional scientists,

individuals who were paid for their devotion to research.
But of all those early pioneers, my hero is the enigmatic Greek mathematician
Euclid.

We know very little about Euclid's life, but his greatest achievements
were as a chronicler of mathematics.

Around 300 BC, he wrote the most important text book of all time -The
Elements. In The Elements, we find the culmination of the mathematical
revolution which had taken place in Greece.

It's built on a series of mathematical assumptions, called axioms. For

example, a line can be drawn between any two points.

From these axioms, logical deductions are made and mathematical

theorems established. The Elements contains formulas for calculating the
volumes of cones and cylinders, proofs about geometric series, perfect
numbers and primes.

The climax of The Elements is a proof that there are only five Platonic
solids. For me, this last theorem captures the power of mathematics. It's one
thing to build five symmetrical solids, quite another to come up with a
watertight, logical argument for why there can't be a sixth. The Elements
unfolds like a wonderful, logical mystery novel.

But this is a story which transcends time. Scientific theories get knocked
down, from one generation to the next, but the theorems in The Elements are
as true today as they were 2,000 years ago. When you stop and think about
it, it's really amazing. It's the same theorems that we teach.

We may teach them in a slightly different way, we may organise them

differently, but it's Euclidean geometry that is still valid, and even in higher
mathematics, when you go to higher dimensional spaces, you're still using
Euclidean geometry. Alexandria must have been an inspiring place for the
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ancient scholars, and Euclid's fame would have attracted even more eager,
young intellectuals to the Egyptian port.

One mathematician who particularly enjoyed the intellectual

environment in Alexandria was Archimedes. He would become a mathematical
visionary. The best Greek mathematicians, they were always pushing the
limits, pushing the envelope.

So, Archimedes did what he could with polygons, with solids. He then
moved on to centres of gravity. He then moved on to the spiral. This instinct
to try and mathematize everything is something that I see as a legacy. One of
Archimedes' specialities was weapons of mass destruction.

They were used against the Romans when they invaded his home of
Syracuse in 212 BC. He also designed mirrors, which harnessed the power of
the sun, to set the Roman ships on fire. But to Archimedes, these endeavours
were mere amusements in geometry. He had loftier ambitions.

Archimedes was enraptured by pure mathematics and believed in

studying mathematics for its own sake and not for the ignoble trade of
engineering or the sordid quest for profit. One of his finest investigations into
pure mathematics was to produce formulas to calculate the areas of regular
shapes. Archimedes' method was to capture new shapes by using shapes he
already understood.

So, for example, to calculate the area of a circle, he would enclose it

inside a triangle, and then by doubling the number of sides on the triangle,
the enclosing shape would get closer and closer to the circle. Indeed, we
sometimes call a circle a polygon with an infinite number of sides. But by
estimating the area of the circle, Archimedes is, in fact, getting a value for pi,
the most important number in mathematics.

However, it was calculating the volumes of solid objects where

Archimedes excelled. He found a way to calculate the volume of a sphere by
slicing it up and approximating each slice as a cylinder. He then added up the
volumes of the slices to get an approximate value for the sphere. But his act
of genius was to see what happens if you make the slices thinner and thinner.

In the limit, the approximation becomes an exact calculation. But it was

Archimedes' commitment to mathematics that would be his undoing.

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Archimedes was contemplating a problem about circles traced in the sand.

When a Roman soldier accosted him, Archimedes was so engrossed in his
problem that he insisted that he be allowed to finish his theorem. But the
Roman soldier was not interested in Archimedes' problem and killed him on
the spot.

Even in death, Archimedes' devotion to mathematics was unwavering.

By the middle of the 1st Century BC, the Romans had tightened their grip on
the old Greek empire. They were less smitten with the beauty of mathematics
and were more concerned with its practical applications.

This pragmatic attitude signalled the beginning of the end for the great
library of Alexandria. But one mathematician was determined to keep the
legacy of the Greeks alive.

Hypatia was exceptional, a female mathematician, and a pagan in the

piously Christian Roman empire. Hypatia was very prestigious and very
influential in her time. She was a teacher with a lot of students, a lot of
followers. She was politically influential in Alexandria. So it's this combination
of high knowledge and high prestige that may have made her a figure of
hatred for the Christian mob.

One morning during Lent, Hypatia was dragged off her chariot by a
zealous Christian mob and taken to a church. There, she was tortured and
brutally murdered. The dramatic circumstances of her life and death
fascinated later generations. Sadly, her cult status eclipsed her mathematical
achievements. She was, in fact, a brilliant teacher and theorist, and her death
dealt a final blow to the Greek mathematical heritage of Alexandria.

My travels have taken me on a fascinating journey to uncover the

passion and innovation of the world's earliest mathematicians. It's the
breakthroughs made by those early pioneers of Egypt, Babylon and Greece
that are the foundations on which my subject is built today.

But this is just the beginning of my mathematical odyssey. The next leg
of my journey lies east, in the depths of Asia, where mathematicians scaled
even greater heights in pursuit of knowledge.

With this new era came a new language of algebra and numbers, better
suited to telling the next chapter in the story of maths.

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