There's a rich history when it comes to math

"Who invented math?," asked Lucia Zhang, 10, a fifth-grader at Butterfield School in Libertyville.

Understanding why we need higher-level math might help to reveal who was behind the development of math.

For thousands of years, man existed with very little math. Not having many belongings and living a life that was mostly spent gathering food, there was not much use for knowing how many or how much.

Once people realized they could share the tasks involved in daily life, they developed a means to quantify what they needed.

First came concrete counting. Each time you wanted to record that one item, like one sheep, you used one token. Two sheep meant that you needed two tokens. Notching a stick is another way to show concrete counting.

A problem developed when you wanted to count a lot of something. The solution came 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians developed abstract counting. They realized it would be hard to carry around a huge bag of tokens if you have a lot of something - like a herd of goats. So they developed a symbol that took the place of each number - what we call Arabic numerals.

Larger numbers and broader math applications were needed when civilizations wanted to construct large buildings, like the pyramids, or build aqueducts to carry water throughout an empire.

For three thousand years mathematicians have applied higher-level concepts like the Pythagorean theorem, which solves the problem of how to measure the side of a right triangle. Many cultures across the globe have used the same system for abstract counting and higher level math applications so they could solve problems like how many people live in large city or how to build roads across hundreds of miles.

Rick Brenner, math teacher at Libertyville High School, said the core equations used today are the same ones developed by history's great mathematicians going back thousands of years. What's different is the technology, which is changing the way students experience math.

"The graphing calculator has made mathematics more dynamic. With the advent of the graphing calculator, a quick change of a coefficient here and there, and bam, you see the effects on the graph," Brenner said.

The ability to quickly calculate complex problems enables students to grasp the concepts more easily. "Instead of concocted book problems that require the students to calculate by hand, we can apply mathematics to more real-world type problems and let the calculator do the worrying if the computations are messy," Brenner said.