Andrew Smith's Reviews > A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

Having gotten lost in complex mathematics, which helps explain the theory of relativity, I thought I’d briefly go back to basics with this short explanation of the history of this academic discipline.

I wasn’t too bad a maths when I was at school, but in retrospect, it was really all quite basic. When I started work and particularly when I became a bank teller, I was required to add up huge columns of numbers in my head, often with my branch manager leaning over my shoulder, checking my accuracy. Needless to say, I eventually became proficient in this exercise, a trick I retain to this day! But much of the other mathematics I learned at school - geometry and trigonometry, to name but two branches - have, to be honest, been of limited use to me. Or, perhaps more accurately, I’ve made limited use of them.

The history of mathematics starts, it seems, with the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians (Pythagoras was a Phoenician). They graduated from a basic abacus to basic arithmetic: additions and subtractions and gradually through to multiplications and divisions – though first in a very clumsy (to us) way. Algebra, geometry, factors, ratios, etc. would follow in time. This brief explanation doesn’t take us any further than this, but it’s interesting enough in and of itself.