Once thought, mathematics was directly related to the natural observations. After the nineteenth century pure mathematics was able to free itself from the limitations of natural observations.
It is obvious that mathematics is born as a part of everyday life. The mathematics encountered in Egypt and Mesopotamia (3000, B.C) are the best known examples of this situation. Although various definitions of mathematics, which some consider to be the queen of sciences, can be briefly described as a branch of science that examines abstract entities such as numbers, points, clusters and their relationships.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, there are ancient clay tablets and papyrus that shows people have found surface measurements of terrain, volume calculations for construction works and canal excavation, and keep records of purchases.
Primitive man often clustered stones into groups of five, because they were familiar with groups of five by observing the human hand and foot. The common use of the decimal system today is nothing more than an anatomical coincidence that we were born with 10 fingers and 10 toes. The stone clusters were very temporary in terms of conservation of knowledge and saving information; therefore, the prehistoric man recorded notches on a piece of wood or bone from time to time. A young wolf bone found with 55 notches in Czechoslovakia is one of the rare specimens we have about this.
Herodotus believed that geometry was born in Egypt because he thought that the need to re-locate the farms after the annual overrun of the Nile gave birth to geometry. According to Aristotle, the existence of a priest class with free time in Egypt encouraged interest in geometry. We can see Heredotus and Aristotle as representatives of two different theories about the beginning of mathematics.
The Greek mathematician Pythagoras is considered by some to be one of the first of the most important mathematicians. He lived between 570 and 495 BC. Pythagoras is also known with the Pythagorean Theorem, which is known by its name, although the proof and its first use are not of his own. Pythagoras can be called the founding father of contemporary mathematics. However, it is claimed that Pythagoras had his student Hipassos strangled to death and left a bad reputation behind.
Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz are honored as discoverers of the so-called “infinitesimal calculus”. Leibniz, the great thinker of philosophy, logic, mechanics and mathematics, is particularly known for his use of the integral sign as a standard and for his great work on topology. Newton, who is a genius in every aspect, went down in history as the main inventor of calculus that survived the age of mathematics, especially if we mention his great scientific work Principia Mathematica here.
Computer scientist and decoder Alan Turing is considered by many to be one of the greatest brilliant minds of the 20th century. During the Second World War, he worked at the British School of Codes and Government Coding services, contributing to the breakthrough of the German Enigma codes by signing great breakthroughs and the development of successful methods of cracking.
These are a little of many great mathematicians through the history.
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