Roman numeral answers – Roman math
Roman tax collector calculating someone's taxes on an abacus (Metz, ca. 225 AD) Did you figure it out? Poor Claudia died when she was 25 years old, seven months, and [...]
Roman tax collector calculating someone's taxes on an abacus (Metz, ca. 225 AD) Did you figure it out? Poor Claudia died when she was 25 years old, seven months, and [...]
Claudia Pieris' tombstone (CIL VI.15543) She lived 117-138 AD. Now in Copenhagen, at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The Romans used several different systems for writing numbers. Sometimes they wrote numbers [...]
Ara Pacis Augustae - the Altar of Peace, in Rome You can see why ancient life expectancies were low for yourself: figure out the average age at death of the following group [...]
Gottfried Leibniz, a German mathematician - Enlightenment science What set off the Enlightenment? By 1650 AD, Europeans understood Islamic algebra and trigonometry better. Then they combined that with the exciting invention of the telescope and microscope (thanks to [...]
Math was a very exciting subject to be working on during the Middle Ages in Europe. Little by little, math experts in Europe were learning from Islamic math experts about what we call Arabic numbers (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) (though the [...]
Tangents: This line is tangent to a circle. What is a tangent? A tangent, like a sine or a cosine, is a mathematical way of thinking about a kind of movement that happens [...]
Sine wave In order to save energy, many, many things in nature move in a kind of repeated pattern we call a sine wave: water waves, sound waves, light waves, [...]
An infinite distance: stars in the sky Since the time of the Sumerians, about 3000 BC, scientists have studied the stars and the planets. They've tried to figure out the patterns in the movements of [...]
Right triangle and cosine What is a cosine? A cosine, like a sine, is a mathematical way of thinking about a kind of movement that happens in nature. A cosine is [...]
A math problem showing place value How can you add big numbers without an abacus? You still group the sheep (or whatever) just as you did when you were using the abacus, but [...]