A right triangle. This is the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem supposedly written by Pythagoras about 500 BC: The Pythagorean Theorem says that in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two right-angle [...]
Neolithic counting tokens Counting with tally sticks and tokens The earliest way of writing down numbers was to carve notches in tally sticks, and this method spread from Africa all over Europe and [...]
A real Babylonian math problem on a clay tablet What math problems did Babylonian kids do? This is a real math problem assigned to Babylonian kids in Iraq about 1900 BC. See if [...]
History of math: Sumerian multiplication table (2700 BC) Cuneiform multiplication table Once people in West Asia figured out how to write down numbers, about 3500 BC, they quickly began to want to use cuneiform to [...]
Sibidu Cave, South Africa. People lived here from about 77,000 BC until about 38,000 years ago. In the early years of human history, beginning with the earliest humans about two million years [...]
Bust of Plotinus (Ostia, ca. 250 AD) Around the time of Jesus, philosophers (and regular people) in West Asia and the Roman Empire started to think a lot about what happened to you after you died. [...]
Weighing the souls of the dead Philosophy means the love of wisdom. But what does that mean? It's hard to separate philosophy from religion. And it's also hard to draw a [...]
Indian numbers and medieval Islamic mathematics Indian numbers About 630 AD, just before the Islamic empire got started, people in West Asia learned from traders or traveling scholars about "Arabic" numbers. Indian mathematics The invention [...]
Muslims playing chess in Spain What is exponential growth? About 1260 AD, Ibn Khallikan, a Kurdish historian living in the Abbasid Empire (modern Iraq), wrote an encyclopedia with biographies of many famous men [...]
History of Math: Counting tokens from Mehrgarh in Late Stone Age India Indian counting tokens and base 10 The first Indian numbers appeared in the late Stone Age, about 4000 BC. Around this time, [...]
