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Arithmatic like language begins in legend. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 5/13, BBC 1973
Numbers are the language of Nature. Pythagoras found a basic relation between music harmony and mathematics. ibid.
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers. Paul Dirac
000-7-17-12-0-14-26 Gemeinschaft Bank Zurich. The Bourne Identity 2002 starring Matt Damon & Franka Potente & Chris Cooper & Brian Cox & Clive Owen & Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje & Gabriel Mann & Julia Stiles et al, director Doug Liman, number from removed chip
I have resigned. I will not be pushed. Filed. Stamped. Indexed. Briefed. Debriefed. Or numbered. My life is my own. My life is my own. I am not a number. I am a free man. The Prisoner, TV series 1967-68
OK, it’s spooky, all right? I’ll grant you. It’s more than spooky. But just step back, all right? You have all these uncircled numbers with no sequence to them. I mean, numerology, kabbalah, pythagorean cults, there are systems that find meaning in numbers, and they are a dime a dozen. Why? Because people see what they want to see in them. Knowing 2009 starring Nicolas Cage & Rose Byrne & Chandler Canterbury & Lara Robinson & Nadia Townsend & Ben Mendelsohn & Alan Hopgood & Liam Hemsworth et al, director Alex Proyas, Phil
Throughout history humankind has struggled to understand the fundamental workings of the material world. We’ve endeavoured to discover the rules and patterns that determine the qualities of the objects that surround us, and their complex relationship to us and each other. Over thousands of years societies all over the world have found that one discipline above all others yields certain knowledge about the underlying realities of the physical world. That discipline is mathematics. Marcus du Sautoy, The Story of Maths I, BBC 2008
We needed to find a way of making sense of these natural patterns. The most basic concepts of Maths – Space & Quantity – are hardwired into our brains. ibid.
The earliest mathematical innovators: the Egyptians needed some way to record the results of their calculations. ibid.
The Egyptians were using a decimals systems motivated by the ten fingers on our hands. ibid.
The Egyptians were brilliant problem-solvers. ibid.
The Egyptians have understood the power of binary ... Today the whole technological world depends on the same principles that were used in ancient Egypt. ibid.
Suddenly new numbers are on the scene: fractions. ibid.
In a four-thousand-year-old document called the Moscow Papyrus we find the formula for the volume of a pyramid with its peak sliced off which shows the first hint of calculus at work. ibid.
Damascus ... They became masters at managing and manipulating numbers ... You can blame those ancient Babylonians for all those tortuous problems you had at school. ibid.
They were using powers of sixty. ibid.
The Babylonian calendar was based on the cycles of the moon. ibid.
This is the first time zero in any form had appeared in a mathematical universe. ibid.
The use of Quadratic Equations: one of the greatest legacies of Babylonian mathematics. ibid.
Quadratic Equations involved things where the unknown quantity you are trying to identify is multiplied by itself. ibid.
The Greeks were passionate about mathematics ... They gave us the power of proof. ibid.
Pythagoras is a controversial figure. ibid.
Experimenting with a stringed instrument Pythagoras discovered that the intervals between harmonious musical notes were always represented by whole number ratios. ibid.
The Academy: Plato founded this school in Athens in 387 B.C. ibid.
We know very little about Euclid’s life, but his greatest achievements were as a chronicler of mathematics. Around 300 B.C. he wrote the most important textbook of all time: The Elements. ibid.
Hypatia was exceptional – a female mathematician ... She was in fact a brilliant theorist and teacher. ibid.
This is the untold story of the mathematics of the East which would transform the West and give birth to the modern world. Marcus du Sautoy, The Story of Maths II: The Genius of the East
A decimal place value system ... It makes calculations very quick. ibid.
Without a zero the written number was very limited. ibid.
Equations are a little bit like cryptic crosswords: you’re given a certain amount of information about some unknown numbers, and from that information you’ve got to deduce what the unknown numbers are. ibid.
Quadratic equations involve numbers that are squared or to the power of two, say five times five. ibid.
We may never know how the Indians came up with their number system, but we do know that they refined and perfected it creating the ancestors for the nine numerals we use across the world today. Many rank the Indian system of counting as one of the greatest intellectual innovations for all time. ibid.
But there was one number missing, and it was the Indians who would introduce it to the world ... zero. ibid.
The power of trigonometry is that it acts like a dictionary translating geometry into numbers and back. ibid.
The Muslim scholars collected and translated many ancient texts, effectively saving them for posterity. ibid.
Al Khwarizmi was to create a whole new mathematical language. It was called Algebra. ibid.
Algebra is the grammar that underlines the way that numbers work. ibid.
Wherever you find growth in Nature you find the Fibonacci numbers. ibid.
The problem of perspective is how to represent the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional canvas. To get a sense of depth, a sense of a third dimension, Piero [della Francesca] used mathematics. Marcus du Sautoy, The Story of Maths III: The Frontiers of Space
How can you actually know anything at all? Then he [Descartes] slips into a dream. And in the dream he understood that the key was to build philosophy on the indisputable facts of mathematics. Numbers he realised could brush away the cobwebs of uncertainty. ibid.
Suddenly geometry has turned into algebra. ibid.
[Pierre] Fermat managed to find several new patterns in numbers that defeated mathematicians for centuries. ibid.
In two miraculous years here [Grantham] he [Newton] developed a new theory of light, discovered gravitation, and scribbled out a revolutionary approach to maths: the calculus. ibid.
[Gottfried] Leibniz also discovered the miracle of calculus shortly after Newton ... Contributions to philosophy and logic which are still highly rated today. But Leibniz was not just a man of words. He was also one of the first people to invent practical calculating machines that worked on the binary system: true forerunners of the computer. ibid.
There is one great dynasty of mathematicians: the Bernoullis. ibid.
I think of him [Leonhard Euler] as the Mozart of Maths ... It concerns calculating infinite sums, the discovery that shot Euler to the top of the mathematical pops when it was announced in 1735. ibid.
In Germany they got, at least in my opinion, the greatest mathematician ever ... The Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss. ibid.
Imaginary numbers have helped us to understand radio waves, to build bridges and aeroplanes; they’re even the key to quantum physics, the science of the sub-atomic world. They provided a map to see how things really are. ibid.
Riemann’s mathematics changed how we see the world: suddenly higher dimensional geometry appeared. Multi-dimensional space is at the heart of so much mathematics done today. ibid.