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 [...]
Roman mold-blown glass (100s AD) West Asian/African science under Roman rule What we call Roman science is a mixture of two different things. The first is the discoveries and inventions [...]
Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer Starting in the 1200s AD, as Europe got richer, great universities got started there. In the later Middle Ages, West Asia and India suffered from the Mongol invasions. West Asian people were too poor 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 [...]
Al Tusi in his observatory (ca. 1259 AD) Nasir al Tusi was born in Iran in 1201 AD, as the Seljuk Empire was falling apart. The Seljuks were Turkic people. But al Tusi, [...]
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, [...]
