Many sources involved in the history of numbers

"How did they come up with numbers?" asked a young Wauconda Library patron.

Stories about the history of numbers generally start in many times and places because no one knows the answers for sure.

What is known is the idea for numbers began when people needed to record information about the passage of time or quantities for trade.

The oldest example is a 35,000-year-old tally stick, 29 lines etched on a baboon bone. It's from Swaziland in eastern Africa. Its purpose is a mystery, but scientists suspect it somehow marks the moon's cycle.

People developed more complex numbers as societies became more centralized, needing to divide plots of land, assign taxes and record astronomical features.

In 2,000 B.C., Babylonians created a base 60 system and added the concept that the position of a number in a sequence reveals the value. Babylonians divided the day into 24 hours and divided hours into 60 minutes.

Architecture, in particular the construction of the pyramids, drove the need for precise calculations in ancient Egypt.

Professor Alain Bresson, Department of Classics and Department of History, University of Chicago, explains why ancient Greeks added to math knowledge: "For the Greeks, there was both the curiosity for abstract reasonings, like for the analysis of prime numbers by Eratosthenes, and the calculation of large amounts of money by the state administrators and by the rich merchants or bankers."

Religion drove math needs for those in the ancient Islamic world, which flourished from 800-1200 A.D.

Professor Babacar Mbengue of DePaul University's Department of History, describes how Islamic world scholars appreciated math foundations from earlier cultures: "Muslims saw themselves as heirs of previous traditions of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as indicated in many of the Prophet Muhammad's sayings. Muslims showed great interest in the knowledge traditions of ancient Greece, China, India, among other cultures."

A drive for even more demanding calculations came from requirements in the Quran, the holy book, detailing inheritance and charitable contributions.

The Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom established in the Abbasid Dynasty, translated Sanskrit and Greek to support Arab scholarship.

Universities in Africa, Spain and China contributed to mathematics principles. Algebra came from the famous Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi, and other great scholars made contributions in number theory and computation.

Just as concepts were borrowed from previous cultures and improved upon, advanced concepts were exchanged with scholars in other cultures, such as those from ancient India.

We think almost nothing about it, but zero has a story, too. The Mayans used math primarily to establish calendars and invented the concept of zero around 2,000 B.C. to mark nonevents.

The Babylonians began to create a place for zero, which then was borrowed by mathematicians in ancient India, then the Middle East and, finally, Europe by the 1100s.

Check it out

The Wauconda Area Library suggests these titles on mathematics:

• "Millions, Billions, & Trillions: Understanding Big Numbers," by David A. Adler

• "Roman "Numerals and Ordinals," by Kylie Burns

• "Probability," by Marina Cohen

• "That's a Possibility!" by Bruce Goldstone

• "Ratios and Percents," by Rebecca Wingard-Nelson