The Sumerians were the inhabitants of a region of ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Its origin is unknown but is speculated to come from Pakistan, Ethiopia and South Caucasus.
Since 3500 BC the Sumerians brought all kinds of advances to civilization, the wheel, the plow, agriculture, and also developed the first writing system.
The math part of everyday life
The Sumerians like the Egyptians used math every day, found archaeological remains from 3000 BC as multiplication or divide to prove it. With the development of agriculture was needed math to measure and divide the parcels of land to collect taxes and to count the passage of time, the Sumerians developed a lunar calendar based on the observation of celestial bodies and their knowledge mathematics.
They were able to observe the various changes of the moon, the lunar months were between 29 and 30 days and realized that every twelve months came to what looked like a similar station and determined that the year would have 12 lunar months.
Mathematics to both the Sumerians to the Babylonians was based on a sexagesimal system or base 60,you could physically count using the twelve knuckles on one hand or five fingers.
The use of symbols or tokens
The Sumerians were pionerillos to link symbols with groups of objects to make easier the description of more. The symbols or tokens were used to represent accounting boats oil, wheat, even had a similar number zero, which had no value.
- At the beginning of the fourth millennium the Sumerians used a clay cone with a stick to represent each
two identical cones 2.
- 10 was shaped spearhead
. Below you can see examples of how the Sumerians counted.
- The number 60 is represented by the same symbol as 1, so many the actual position of a symbol had to be inferred from the context.
The sexagesimal system
This type of system uses as the number 60 based arithmetic has been speculated that the great advances in Babylonian mathematics were due precisely to 60 have much dividers (like 1,2,3,4,5,6,10, 12,15,20,30,60). Today continues to draw attention as we use the number 60, we talked about 60 minutes to set a time or 60 seconds to set a minute.
Babylonian tablets found between 1800 and 1600 BC covering topics as diverse as algebra, fractions, cubic equations, calculating the same reciprocal pairs.
They envisioned what would later become the Pythagorean Theorem
The Plimpton 332 tablet on clay believed to date from 1800 BC, the Babylonian suggesting they may have discovered the secret of right triangles (the square of the hypotenuse is equal to a sum of the squares of the other two sides), this implies that advanced the Pythagorean Theorem, many centuries before the discovery of Pythagoras (Pythagoras lived from 580 to 495 BC) Here we talk about between 1800 -1600 years BC.
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Source | /www.storyofmathematics.com
