The History of Numbers

Numbers are one of the most important things made by man. Numbers dictate our lives, and are used in almost everything imaginable. Numbers are used in every subject in school, and almost every job you can think of.  We use numbers when we count, when we calculate longitude and latitude, when we tell time and when we calculate prices at the shopping mall.  A numeral is the symbol that represents a number. There are many different numerals for certain numbers. For example, for the number one, there are: 1, I, a, -, or |.  The history of numbers has more twists and turns than the Corkscrew (a really twisty roller coaster in an amusement park in Florida…I think). It is similar to a fantasy novel – you never know what lies on the next page. There is a murder, there is the rise and fall of empires…but the numbers stayed strong. There are many different kinds of numerals too. Romans used letters, Egyptians used pictures, and the Brahmi from India used symbols specifically for numbers.

Numbers are older than speech, older than any numeral to represent them. There is a clear inscription of what is known today as a tally mark on a wolf bone from 32000 years ago! The tally was most likely used for counting purposes only. Twenty-seven thousand years later was when the first full counting system was formed. Egyptians and Babylonians developed their number systems at right about the same time. The Egyptians needed it to keep track of sales, and the Babylonians used it for basic addition and subtraction. The Egyptians used pictures of everyday things, while the Babylonians used lines and triangles. They each had the system that worked for them. They used their own systems for thousands of years. B

Around 500 B.C., along came Pythagoras, a famous Greek mathematician. He took those numbers to heart. Pythagoras was the leader of a small group of mathematicians. He believed that numbers were perfect. Invincible, if you will. Then, one day a younger mathematician started to do some decimal division. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t get the number to become whole. Intrigued with his discovery, he went to tell Pythagoras about it, which we now know as irrationals. An irrational is a number that never ceases to continue after the decimal point. An example of this is pi. Pythagoras saw this and was angry. His precious numbers were flawed. His decision was to murder the discoverer. He drowned his loyal follower. No one could ever know that numbers weren’t perfect.