History
There has long been a standard account of the development of geometry in ancient Egypt, followed by Greek mathematics and the emergence of deductive logic. The modern sense of the term mathematics, as meaning only those systems justified with reference to axioms, is however an anachronism if read back into history. Several ancient societies built impressive mathematical systems and carried out complex calculations based on proofless heuristics and practical approaches. Mathematical facts were accepted on a pragmatic basis. Empirical methods, as in science, provided the justification for a given technique. Commerce, engineering, calendar creation and the prediction of eclipses and stellar progression were practiced by ancient cultures on at least three continents.
Read more about this topic: Informal Mathematics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)