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a land long forgotten.

maths

There are two major divisions of Mathematics, Pure and Applied

Pure Mathematics seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake rather than any immediate practical use.

Applied Mathematics develops tools and techniques for solving specific problems of business, engineering and other fields. ''' history

c. 2500 B.C. The people of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) developed a positional numbering (place-value) system, in which the value of a digit depends on its position in a number. c. 876 B.C. A symbol for zero was used for the first time, in India. c. 190 B.C. Chinese mathematicians used powers of 10 to express magnitudes c. 100 B.C. Chinese mathematicians began using negative numbers. c. 550 B.C. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras formulated a theorem relating the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. The theorem was already known by earlier mathematicians in China, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. c. 300 B.C. Euclid laid out the laws of geometry in his book Elements, which was to remain a standard text for 2,000 years. c. 230 B.C. Eratosthenes developed a method for finding all prime numbers c. 210 Diophantus of Alexandria wrote the first book on algebra. c. 600 A decimal number system was developed in India c. 829 Persian mathematician Muhammad Musa al-Khwarizmi published a work on algebra that made use of the decimal number system. 1202 Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci studied the sequence of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. 1514 The Dutch Mathematician Vander Hoecke used the signs plus (+) and minus (-) for the first time in algebraic expressions. 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus a Polish astronomer, uses Mathematics to prove that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the universe. 1550 In Germany, Rheticus published trigonometrical tables that simplified calculations involving triangles. 1557 Robert Recorde introduced the equals sign (=) into Mathematics. 1614 Scottish mathematician John Napier invented logarithms, which enable lengthy calculations involving multiplication and division to be carried out by addition and subtraction. 1623 Wilhelm Schickard invented the mechanical calculating machine. 1654 In France, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat developed probability theory. 1679 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced binary arithmetic, in which only two symbols are used to represent all numbers. 1717 Abraham Sharp calculated Pi to 72 decimal places. 1742 German mathematician Christian Goldbach conjectures that every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. Goldbach's conjecture has still not been proved. 1811 French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace published the first complete account of probability theory. 1822 In the UK, Charles Babbage began construction of the first mechanical computer, the difference machine, a device for calculating logarithms and trigonometric functions. 1858 English mathematician Arthur Cayley developed calculations using ordered tables called matrices. 1865 August Ferdinand Möbius in Germany described how a strip of paper can have only one side and one edge. 1937 English mathematician Alan Turing published the mathematical theory of computing 1945 The first general purpose, fully electronic digital computer was built at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. 1961 Meteorologist Edward Lorenz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, discovered a mathematical system with chaotic behaviour, leading to a new branch of mathematics - chaos theory 1970's Computer-based mathematical models came into use in business, industry and science 1989 A team of US computer mathematicians at Amdahl Corporation, California, discovered the highest known prime number (it contains 65,087 digits). 1993 British mathematician Andrew Wiles published a 1,000-page proof of Fermat's last theorem, one of the most baffling challenges in pure mathematics.

y=f(x) but F(x)=x so y must = x therefore y=x.