History of Mathematics in Asia
The Passing of Time....
The history of mathematics is a broad subject spanning over 10,000 years. Throughout time, women and men in countless cultures have tried to deal with problems presented by the passing of day and night, the changing seasons of the year, the flooding cycles of major rivers, and so on.
In addition, women and men have attempted to group periods of their lifecycle in order to regulate and celebrate important personal, family and community events.
This measurement of time, of the
seasons, phases of the moon, blossoming of trees and plants
, and so on, led to the
development of calendars, recorded in oral memory, and later hand-written on
cave walls, clay tablets, scrolls, paper, etc.
There are a diverse collection of calendars in Asia, the Chinese calendar, the South Asian calendar, the Tibetan calendar and so on.
From One Finger To Infinity....
From one finger, a fist or a hand; to personal computers and the Internet, the history of math tells us the human story of problems and solutions, and shows us the on-going connection between math and people's lives. Some of the the first drawings and writings discovered, contained matematical concepts.
The need to know "how much?" children, animals or other items one had, led to the introduction of measurements; the need to know direction, and the construction of dwellings and agricluture posed problems in geometry. Some of the earliest examples of the development of mathematics in these areas occured in China and South Asia.
