Today I'm going to tell you a story about my adventures in time with mathematics. It all started with a discussion in math class about the beginning of math , and how it all began. I couldn’t get enough of it so I decided to take it upon myself to find out more. That night I got in my time machine and went back 100,000 years to the very beginning of man kind. I discovered that even then they were using mathematical symbols such as dots, lines and curves.
We then travelled forward to when Egyptians lived. We found that Egyptians had their own decimal system using seven different symbols. 1 was a single stroke, 10 was a hobble for cattle, 100 was a coil of rope, 1000 was a drawing of lotus plant, 10 000 was a finger, 100 000 was a tadpole or frog, and 1 000 000 was a figure of a god. They used these numbers just as we do today, to solve many problems like the construction of pyramids.
I decided then that it was almost time to head home. I took one last quick trip to 600 B.C. in Greece. There I met, the man who is said to be the first person to have mathematical discoveries credited to him. His name as Thales of Miletus. He was also the first of the seven wise men of Greece. He discovered many things that are still used today such as "a triangle inscribed in a semicircle is a right triangle" and "two triangles are the same if two points are the same and the length of the side between those two angles are the same" and many others. Thales was the first to look at geometric figures as abstraction instead of real-life objects.
After that I headed home. I found that many things discovered way back then, are still used today. The geometric formulas invented by the Greeks are used to build pretty much anything and will be for the years to come.
Resources
http://www.k12.hi.us/~mathappl/MAch1Lines.html
http://www.eyelid.co.uk/numbers.html