Something that I really enjoy about math history is how it could provide some pretty useful context on why a certain theorem was looked into and then discovered. In my post, I will highlight three takeaways that I found super interesting from “The Crest of the Peacock”. The first interesting fact that I found was that the “Babylonians had developed a place-value number system, knew different methods of solving quadratic equations and understood the relationship between the sides of the right-angled triangle”. The reason why I find this interesting is because these two inventions are vital to the foundations of mathematics and geometry. In my own learning, I have used both of these concepts from grade school all the way up to my fourth year of university! The second interesting takeaway that I got from this text is that the “Arabic text... (which maybe loosely translated as ‘calculation by Restoration and Reduction')... refers to the two main operations in solving equations: ‘reunion’, the transfer of negative terms from one side of the equation to the other and ‘reduction’, the merging of like terms on the same side into a single term". I find this discovery to be quite intriguing because this tells me that there was so much thought that was put into something that is a strategy used when solving basic algebraic problems; where you gather the like terms onto one side of the equal sign and try to solve for the variable. Lastly, the Mayas "had accurate estimates of the duration of solar, lunar and planetary movements". Without the invention of telescopes and transportation into space, it seems nearly impossible to accurately predict something beyond the scope of observation.
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