Where did math come from who invented it they sure didn't have it in the caveman days?
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Math is a natural extension of human needs to count and measure. Cavemen probably did need to compare groups of things (Which group of stones is larger?) and that leads to comparison words (> < =) in human languages. Then natural numbers are invented to communicate and count quantitatively (1 2 3 ...). More operations, plus, minus, multiply, divide, are invented as needs arise and human societies and technology become more complex. \n\nIt's likely that school math curricula more or less trace such historical progress from basic to complex math knowledge. Starting from comparisons in kindergarten and go through numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percents, in primary school. Most of these constructs were known millennia ago. Then algebra, geometry, trigonometry--now studied in high school--were invented within the last few thousand years. Analytic geometry and Calculus, the next major advances, were built on algebra & geometry knowledge and matured to today's form in the last few hundred years. Today, they are studied in late high school and university years. \n\nMany, many people throughout history contributed to the advances and accumulation math knowledge. Prominent mathematicians did more than most and three people are often hailed as the most outstanding of mathematicians in history: Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss.\n\nFor more details, see The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/
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The origins of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians, who developed an advanced arithmetical system with which they were able to do calculations in an algebraic fashion. With the use of this system they were able to apply formulae and calculate solutions for unknown values for a class of problems typically solved today by using linear equations, quadratic equations, and indeterminate linear equations. By contrast, most Egyptians of this era, and most Indian, Greek and Chinese mathematicians in the first millennium BC usually solved such equations by geometric methods, such as those described in the Moscow and Rhind Mathematical Papyri, Sulba Sutras, Euclid's Elements, and The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art. This geometric work of the Greeks, typified in the Elements provided the framework for generalizing formulae beyond the solution of particular problems into more general systems of stating and solving equations.\n\nIndian mathematicians proceeded to write treatises on algebraic means of solving equations from the end of the first millennium BC, followed by Hellenistic mathematicians from the early first millennium AD. Important algebraic works from this general era include the Bakhshali Manuscript, the works of Hero of Alexandria, the Arithmetica of Diophantus, the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, and the Brahma Sputa Siddhanta of Brahmagupta.\n\nThe word "algebra" is named after the Arabic word "al-jabr" from the title of the book al-Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa-l-muqābala, meaning The book of Summary Concerning Calculating by Transposition and Reduction, a book written by Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Ḵwārizmī in 820. The word al-jabr means "reunion". Al-Khwarizmi is often considered the "father of algebra" (though that title is also given to Diophantus), as much of his works on reduction are still in use today. Another Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam developed algebraic geometry and found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. Indian mathematician Bhaskara and Chinese mathematician Zhu Shijie solved cubic, quartic (biquadratic) and higher-order polynomial equations.\n\nAnother key event in the further development of algebra was the general algebraic solution of the cubic and quartic equations, developed in the mid-16th century. The idea of a determinant was developed by Japanese mathematician Kowa Seki in the 17th century, followed by Gottfried Leibniz ten years later, for the purpose of solving systems of simultaneous linear equations using matrices. Gabriel Cramer also did some work on matrices and determinants in the 18th century. Abstract algebra was developed in the 19th century, initially focusing on what is now called Galois theory, and on constructibility issues.\n\nThe stages of the development of symbolic algebra are roughly as follows:\nRhetorical algebra, which was developed by the Babylonians and remained dominant up to the 16th century;\nGeometric constructive algebra, which was emphasised by the Vedic Indian and classical Greek mathematicians;\nSyncopated algebra, as developed by Diophantus and in the Bakhshali Manuscript; and\nSymbolic algebra, which sees its culmination in the work of Leibniz.\n \nCover of the 1621 edition of Diophantus' Arithmetica, translated into Latin by Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac.\n\nA timeline of key algebraic developments are as follows:\nCirca 1800 BC: The Old Babylonian Strassburg tablet seeks the solution of a quadratic elliptic equation.\nCirca 1600 BC: The Plimpton 322 tablet gives a table of Pythagorean triples in Babylonian Cuneiform script.\nCirca 800 BC: Indian mathematician Baudhayana, in his Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, discovers Pythagorean triples algebraically, finds geometric solutions of linear equations and quadratic equations of the forms ax2 = c and ax2 + bx = c, and finds two sets of positive integral solutions to a set of simultaneous Diopha
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If you don't count the abacus, which is ancient, then Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical computation machine in France in 1642. Check it yo!\n\nhttp://www.thocp.net/hardware/pascaline.htm
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There is actually a little controversy surrounding whether or not Pythagoras was actually the one who discovered the theorem, or if it was another of his associates, the Pythagoreans.  This website: http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~demo5337/Group3/hist.html has some interesting history of other cultures illustrating an understanding of this, without expressing it in literal mathematical language.\n\nAs far as your second question, a great illustration can be found at http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53937.html    The pythagorean theorem is actually a specific instance of the law of cosines, which is represented as a^2 = b^2 + c^2 - 2ab*cos(a).  As you can see, the equation only becomes the pythagorean theorem if 2ab*cos(a) = 0, which only happens if the angle is 90 degrees.
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Vulgar fractions had been used by the Egyptians around 1000 BC; the Vedic "Sulba Sutras" ("rule of chords" in Sanskrit) * ca. 600 BC contain the first use of irrational numbers, and approximation of π at 3.16. Around 500 BC, the Greek mathematicians led by Pythagoras realized the need for irrational numbers in particular the irrationality of the square root of two. Negative numbers were invented by Indian mathematicians around 600 AD, and then possibly invented independently in China shortly after. They were not used in Europe until the 1600s, but even in the late 1700s, Leonhard Euler discarded negative solutions to equations as unrealistic.\n\nIn the 18th and 19th centuries there was much work on irrational and transcendental numbers. Lambert (1761) gave the first flawed proof that π cannot be rational, Legendre (1794) completed the proof, and showed that π is not the square root of a rational number. Ruffini (1799) and Abel (1842) both construct proofs of Abel–Ruffini theorem: that the general quintic or higher equations cannot be solved by a general formula involving only arithmetical operations and roots. Évariste Galois (1832) developed techniques for determining whether a given equation could be solved by radicals which gave rise to the field of Galois theory. Joseph Liouville (1840) showed that neither e nor e2 can be a root of an integer quadratic equation, and then established existence of transcendental numbers, the proof being subsequently displaced by Georg Cantor (1873). Charles Hermite (1873) first proved that e is transcendental, and Ferdinand von Lindemann (1882), showed that π is transcendental. Lindemann's proof was much simplified by Weierstrass (1885), still further by David Hilbert (1893), and has finally been made elementary by Hurwitz and Paul Albert Gordan.\n\nThe development of calculus in the 1700s used the entire set of real numbers without having defined them cleanly. The first rigorous definition was given by Georg Cantor in 1871. In 1874 he shows that the set of all real numbers is uncountably infinite but the set of all algebraic numbers is countably infinite. Contrary to widely held beliefs, his method was not his famous diagonal argument, which he published three years later.
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You've gotta put Euler on your list; he's one of the most prolific mathematicians EVER.  Archimedes is probably the best ancient mathematician.  (Pythagoras may be famous for his theorem, but that theorem was known to the Chinese before Pythagoras' time.)  For a name that's been passed down through the ages, though, you've gotta go with al-Khowarizmi.  While he wasn't an innovator, his classic text "al-Jabr wa'l Muqabala" gave us the term "algebra" and his name is the basis of our word "algorithm".
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hello.obviously the answer from any keyboard would be albert einstein.we hav many instances to name as why he is prodigious in math and physical calclations...
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Pythagoras was born around 570 BC.  He had a bunch of followers, called Pythagoreans.  Scholars don't know much about Pythagoras' views himself- we just have books from secondhand sources or from his followers.  A guy named Philolaus was the first Pythagorean who left a book we have access to.  Basically, pythagoreans believed that numbers and ratios could be used to understand the universe.  They are well known for the Pythagorean theorem, relating a triangles hypotenuse to its two sides, and for their work on musical scales.
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Your friend is right. Algebra originates from the ancient Babylonians of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), with later developments being contributed by Indian, Japanese, and Chinese mathematicians.\n\nHere's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article (see the link below for the full article):\n\nThe word algebra comes from the Arabic word "al-jabr" from the title of the book al-Kitāb al-muḫtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa-l-muqābala, meaning The book of Summary Concerning Calculating by Transposition and Reduction, a book written by Persian Muslim mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Ḵwārizmī in 820. The word al-jabr means "reunion". Al-Khwarizmi is often considered the "father of algebra" (though that title is also given to Diophantus), as much of his works on reduction are still in use today. Another Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam developed algebraic geometry and found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. Indian mathematician Bhaskara and Chinese mathematician Zhu Shijie solved cubic, quartic (biquadratic) and higher-order polynomial equations.
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Zero, zip, zilch - how often has a question been answered by one of these words? Countless, no doubt. Yet behind this seemingly simple answer conveying nothing lays the story of an idea that took many centuries to develop, many countries to cross, and many minds to comprehend. Understanding and working with zero is the basis of our world today; without zero we would lack calculus, financial accounting, the ability to make arithmetic computations quickly, and, especially in today's connected world, computers. The story of zero is the story of an idea that has aroused the imagination of great minds across the globe.\n\nWhen anyone thinks of one hundred, two hundred, or seven thousand the image in his or her mind is of a digit followed by a few zeros. The zero functions as a placeholder; that is, three zeroes denotes that there are seven thousands, rather than only seven hundreds. If we were missing one zero, that would drastically change the amount. Just imagine having one zero erased (or added) to your salary! Yet, the number system we use today - Arabic, though it in fact came originally from India - is relatively new. For centuries people marked quantities with a variety of symbols and figures, although it was awkward to perform the simplest arithmetic calculations with these number systems.\n\nThe Sumerians were the first to develop a counting system to keep an account of their stock of goods - cattle, horses, and donkeys, for example. The Sumerian system was positional; that is, the placement of a particular symbol relative to others denoted its value. The Sumerian system was handed down to the Akkadians around 2500 BC and then to the Babylonians in 2000 BC. It was the Babylonians who first conceived of a mark to signify that a number was absent from a column; just as 0 in 1025 signifies that there are no hundreds in that number. Although zero's Babylonian ancestor was a good start, it would still be centuries before the symbol as we know it appeared.\n\nThe renowned mathematicians among the Ancient Greeks, who learned the fundamentals of their math from the Egyptians, did not have a name for zero, nor did their system feature a placeholder as did the Babylonian. They may have pondered it, but there is no conclusive evidence to say the symbol even existed in their language. It was the Indians who began to understand zero both as a symbol and as an idea. \n\nBrahmagupta, around 650 AD, was the first to formalize arithmetic operations using zero. He used dots underneath numbers to indicate a zero. These dots were alternately referred to as 'sunya', which means empty, or 'kha', which means place. Brahmagupta wrote standard rules for reaching zero through addition and subtraction as well as the results of operations with zero. The only error in his rules was division by zero, which would have to wait for Isaac Newton and G.W. Leibniz to tackle.\n\nBut it would still be a few centuries before zero reached Europe. First, the great Arabian voyagers would bring the texts of Brahmagupta and his colleagues back from India along with spices and other exotic items. Zero reached Baghdad by 773 AD and would be developed in the Middle East by Arabian mathematicians who would base their numbers on the Indian system. In the ninth century, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi was the first to work on equations that equaled zero, or algebra as it has come to be known. He also developed quick methods for multiplying and dividing numbers known as algorithms (a corruption of his name). Al-Khowarizmi called zero 'sifr', from which our cipher is derived. By 879 AD, zero was written almost as we now know it, an oval - but in this case smaller than the other numbers. And thanks to the conquest of Spain by the Moors, zero finally reached Europe; by the middle of the twelfth century, translations of Al-Khowarizmi's work had weaved their way to England.\n\nThe Italian mathematician, Fibonacci, built on Al-Khowarizmi's
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Some form of math has been around as long as people have.  "The evolution of mathematics might be seen to be an ever-increasing series of abstractions, or alternatively an expansion of subject matter. The first abstraction was probably that of numbers. The realization that two apples and two oranges do have something in common, namely that they fill the hands of exactly one person, was a breakthrough in human thought. In addition to recognizing how to count concrete objects, prehistoric peoples also recognized how to count abstract quantities, like time -- days, seasons, years. Arithmetic (e.g. addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), naturally followed. Monolithic monuments testify to a knowledge of geometry."
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zero was known to indians well before others. An ancient indian astronomer named ARYABHATT have discovered zero for his complex astronomical calculation. Arabs were responsible to introduce zero from india to europe. \n                         \nIndians are believed to have calculated value of 'g' the gravity much before newton.Similarly ancient indian text shows evidence for calculation of pi with atmost precision.
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JOHN NAPIER,  a Scottish mathematician \ninvented a tool called Napier's Bones on early 1600s, which were multiplication tables inscribed on strips of wood or bone. ^_^
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Fermat claimed he had a proof 300 years ago but he\nnever demonstrated it. Andrew Wiles proved it in 1996\nbut had to use 20th century mathematics. There's an interesting book called Fermat's Enigma dedicated to\nDr. Wiles 7 year quest to prove it. There's also a \ndocumentary which has been aired on PBS which I've\nseen twice and wouldn't miss it if it came out again.
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Our story begins with a primitive man, who needed a way to keep track of things. Eventually, he needed a way to know how many wives, children, pets, how much gold, etc he had. He discovered the natural numbers (1,2,3,4,...)\nNatural numbers were probably discovered independently by many of our early ancestors.\n\nFractions were introduced later to deal with division of stuff into different portions. Some weirdo also thought of negative numbers.\n\nFrom here, people began to add to the natural numbers. The Hindus invented 0 (zero) to represent nothingness, a topic which could consume an entire book. By that point we had integers.\n\nThe Greeks then discovered that they could arrive at numbers which could not be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers. Using Pythagoras' Theorem, they stumbled upon irrational numbers. Now we have all of the real numbers.\n\nWhen mathematicians began to search for solutions to higher-degree equations, they invented a square root for -1 and created the complex numbers.\n\nCool, eh?
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The first theoretical calculation seems to have been carried out by Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC). He obtained the approximation \n\n223/71 < π < 22/7. \n\nBefore giving an indication of his proof, notice that very considerable sophistication involved in the use of inequalities here. Archimedes knew, what so many people to this day do not, that π does not equal 22/7, and made no claim to have discovered the exact value. If we take his best estimate as the average of his two bounds we obtain 3.1418, an error of about 0.0002.π \n\nHow is Archimedes' Arguments, you could see on the link below ( 1st link).\n\nHowever, scientists using computer to get the walue of pi today(look 2nd link).
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That's an interesting question. But the answer may seem a bit weird at first. I suggest you read the answer carefully.\n\nThe world has invented the number system. \nIn olden days, the arabians and egyptians used numbers from 1 to 9. But the theory of negative numbers came only after a brilliant Indian Mathematician ARYABHATTA devised the number zero as the king of all numbers. Zero is undoutedly the most important and the backbone of maths and the number system.\nThe number system was extended on both sides of zero around the 1800s to 1900s to form nearly more than 100 numbers on each side. With time, the number system has advanced and now we know that its limitless.\nEverything that is made around us has many helping hands. Always remember that my friend. Keeping asking such provoking questions. They will shape you into a good character.