The History of Numbers

Well, it didn’t look like it worked. Two hundred years after that particular incident, a man by the name of Euclid came upon these irrationals, as they are now known. And so, 150 years after Pythagoras, every one who could read knew about irrationals. Unrelated to math, Jesus was born in 4 B.C. He lived to the ripe old age of 33, and now lives forever in heaven. In 600 AD, the Arabic numeral system was invented.

300 years later, the Arabs living in Spain were using it. More and more people started to use the Arabic system. A prominent mathematician, Fibonacci, was one of the first to adopt the system. He loved it, and wrote his famous book, Liber Abaci, about the legendary system. However, it was still very hard to motivate people to use this new system. They didn’t think that a number that stood for nothing, 0, could be put at the end of a number to multiply it by 10. It ended up taking 500 years before it was implemented as the main system. It became almost universally utilized. During that period of time, the number system continued to change. Eventually, the system evolved into the numeral system as we know it today – numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

In the 16th Century, imaginary numbers were created. During the next 400 years, a lot of very complex mathematical theorems were created. Some include the Argand diagram, Gödel’s theory of incompleteness or Cantor’s theory of countable infinites. I cannot define these particular theorems as they are extremely complex.

Finally, we reach our present time. Binary numbers were invented in the 20th century, and they have really taken off from then. Binary numbers were created for the running of computers, so that they could compute information. The number 1 in binary is 1, 2 is 10, 3 is 11, 4 is 100, 5 is 101, so on and so forth.

As you can see, the history of numbers has a very interesting story behind it. Numbers are the reason that we have technology. Tally marks evolved into pictorial numerals. From there, alphabetical numerals were created. Then the alphabets added the symbols that represented numbers and only numbers to the standard alphabet. They eventually changed to become the numerals we have today. Life without numbers would be life without technology. The computer would be unheard of, and we could hardly imagine life without those. The sundial would still be used instead of our digital clocks with numbers on them. Numbers are very important to our everyday existence.