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Math History 5th Grade assignment
The history of mathematics is nearly as old as humanity itself. Since the ancient past, mathematics has been included to advances in science, engineering, and philosophy. It has evolved from simple counting, measurement and calculation, and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects, through the application of the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, imagination and logic, to the wide, complex and often existing thought discipline we know today.

From the notched bones of early man to the mathematical advances brought about by settled agriculture in Mesopotamia and Egypt and the revolutionary developments of ancient Greece and its Hellenistic empire, the story of mathematics is a long and impressive one.

The East carried on the baton, particularly China, India and the medieval Islamic empire, before the focus of mathematical innovation moved back to Europe in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Then, a whole new series of revolutionary developments occurred in 1700 and 1800 in Europe, setting the stage for the increasing complexity and abstraction of 19th Century mathematics, and finally the disrespectful and sometimes devastating discoveries of the 20th Century.

== 1700-2000 ==

1700-The invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later improved by Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy and mathematics by making some difficult calculations relatively easy. It was one of the most significant mathematical developments of the age, and 17th Century physicists like Kepler and Newton could never have performed the complex calculations needed for their innovations without it. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace remarked, almost two centuries later, that Napier, by halving the labors of astronomers, had doubled their lifetimes.

1800-The period was dominated, though, by one family, the Bernoulli’s of Basel in Switzerland, which boasted two or three generations of exceptional mathematicians, particularly the brothers, Jacob and Johann. They were largely responsible for further developing Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus - paricularly through the generalization and extension of calculus known as the "calculus of variations" - as well as Pascal and Fermat’s probability and number theory.

1900-After the French Revolution, Napoleon emphasized the practical usefulness of mathematics and his reforms and military ambitions gave French mathematics a big boost, as exemplified by “the three L’s”, Lagrange, Laplace and Legendre, Fourier and Galois.

2000-It also saw mathematics become a major profession, involving thousands of new Ph.D.s each year and jobs in both teaching and industry, and the development of hundreds of specialized areas and fields of study, such as group theory, knot theory, sheaf theory, topology, graph theory, functional analysis, singularity theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, model theory, category theory, game theory, complexity theory and many more.

== 5 Mathematical Geniuses == -Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German mathematician and physicist born in the territory of today's Poland. He laid the basics of the vector count. He also dealt with linguistics, botany and ethnography. He studied the subject of electricity, color and acoustics in the field of physics.

-Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics.His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known by the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E=mc2. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the evolution of quantum theory.

-Alan Mathison Turing was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist.

-John Von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath.

-Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, author and physicist.