NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
BSEd Math 1 Concepcion, Iloilo Professor
SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
Module 4, Lesson 1
Prehistoric Mathematics
18TH,19TH AND 20TH CENTURY
I. Introduction:
In this module you will be introduced the history of mathematics in the
period of 18 century, 19th century, 20th century.
th
II. Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this module, you must have to:
I. Demonstrated understanding on the prehistoric mathematics during
the a) 18th century period, b) 19th century, c) 20th century.
II. Have awareness on the number system during the a) 18th century
period, b) 19th century, c) 20th century.
III. Wrote numbers using the number system during the a) 18th century
period, b) 19th century, c) 20th century.
III. Learning Content
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Opinions can in all probability invariably disagree concerning the “correct” starting
for the period of time of arithmetic, however many things are clear. each anthropology
and social science show that almost all if not all human cultures have had a minimum of
some crude ideas of numbers, with a number of the earliest archaeological proof
scientifically dated around thirty,000 years agone. Varied archaeological discoveries
additionally indicate that a lot of prehistoric cultures had discovered that count larger
quantities was easier with some means that of grouping along mounted numbers of
objects. As an instance, twelve stones may be organized in 2 teams of 5 and one
cluster of two, and equally for different numbers one will call out teams of 5 till there are
under five things left. Such arrangements are the primary step within the development
of variety system.
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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3.2 18th Century Mathematics
Most of the late 17th
Century and a good part of the
early 18th were taken up by the
work of disciples of Newton and
Leibniz, who applied their ideas
on calculus to solving a variety of
problems in physics, astronomy
and engineering. They were
largely responsible for further
developing Leibniz‟s infinitesimal
calculus – paricularly through the
generalization and extension of
calculus known as the “calculus
of variations” – as well as Pascal and Fermat‟s probability and number theory. Basel
was also the home town of the greatest of the 18th Century mathematicians, Leonhard
Euler, although, partly due to the difficulties in getting on in a city dominated by the
Bernoulli family, Euler spent most of his time abroad, in Germany and St. He excelled in
all aspects of mathematics, from geometry to calculus to trigonometry to algebra to
number theory and was able to find unexpected links between the different fields. In a
letter to Euler in 1742, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach proposed the
Goldbach Conjecture, which states that every even integer greater than 2 can be
expressed as the sum of two primes or, in another equivalent version, every integer
greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three primes.
They remain among the oldest unsolved problems in number theory , although
the weak form of the conjecture appears to be closer to resolution than the strong
one. Goldbach also proved other theorems in number theory such as the Goldbach-
Euler Theorem on perfect powers. Despite Euler‟s and the Bernoullis‟ dominance of
18th Century mathematics, many of the other important mathematicians were from
France. In the early part of the century, Abraham de Moivre is perhaps best known for
de Moivre‟s formula, n = cos + isin, which links complex numbers and trigonometry.
But he also generalized Newton‟s famous binomial theorem into the multinomial
theorem, pioneered the development of analytic geometry, and his work on the normal
distribution and probability theory were of great importance. France became even more
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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prominent towards the end of the century, and a handful of late 18th Century French
mathematicians in particular deserve mention at this point, beginning with “the three
L‟s”. Joseph Louis Lagrange collaborated with Euler in an important joint work on the
calculus of variation, but he also contributed to differential equations and number
theory, and he is usually credited with originating the theory of groups, which would
become so important in 19th and 20th Century mathematics. His name is given an early
theorem in group theory, which states that the number of elements of every sub-group
of a finite group divides evenly into the number of elements of the original finite group.
Lagrange is also
credited with the four-square
theorem, that any natural
number can be represented
as the sum of four
squares , as well as another
theorem, confusingly also
known as Lagrange‟s
Theorem or Lagrange‟s
Mean Value Theorem, which
states that, given a section
of a smooth continuous
curve, there is at least one point on that section at which the derivative of the curve is
equal to the average derivative of the section. Lagrange‟s 1788 treatise on analytical
mechanics offered the most comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics since
Newton, and formed a basis for the development of mathematical physics in the 19th
Century. Pierre-Simon
Laplace, sometimes
referred to as “the French
Newton”, was an important
mathematician and
astronomer, whose
monumental work “Celestial
Mechanics” translated the
geometric study of classical
mechanics to one based on
calculus, opening up a
much broader range of
problems.
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
3.3 19th Century Mathematics
The 19th Century
saw an unprecedented
increase in the breadth and
complexity of mathematical
concepts. Both France and
Germany were caught up in
the age of revolution which
swept Europe in the late
18th Century, but the two
countries treated
mathematics quite
differently. After the French
Revolution, Napoleon
emphasized the practical
usefulness of mathematics
and his reforms and military ambitions gave French mathematics a big boost, as
exemplified by “the three L‟s”, Lagrange, Laplace and Legendre, Fourier and
Galois. Joseph Fourier‟s study, at the beginning of the 19th Century, of infinite sums in
which the terms are trigonometric functions were another important advance in
mathematical analysis.
Periodic functions that can be expressed as the sum of an infinite series of sines
and cosines are known today as Fourier Series, and they are still powerful tools in pure
and applied mathematics. Fourier also contributed towards defining exactly what is
meant by a function, although the definition that is found in texts today – defining it in
terms of a correspondence between elements of the domain and the range – is usually
attributed to the 19th Century German mathematician Peter Dirichlet. Even though the
Dane Caspar Wessel had produced a very similar paper at the end of the 18th
Century, and even though it was Gauss who popularized the practice, they are still
known today as Argand Diagrams. Germany, on the other hand, under the influence of
the great educationalist Wilhelm von Humboldt, took a rather different
approach, supporting pure mathematics for its own sake, detached from the demands of
the state and military.
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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It was in this environment that the young German prodigy Carl Friedrich
Gauss, sometimes called the “Prince of Mathematics”, received his education at the
prestigious University of Göttingen. Some of Gauss‟ ideas were a hundred years ahead
of their time and touched on many different parts of the mathematical world, including
geometry, number theory, calculus, algebra and probability. Later in life, Gauss also
claimed to have investigated a kind of non-Euclidean geometry using curved space
but, unwilling to court controversy, he decided not to pursue or publish any of these
avant-garde ideas. This left
the field open for János Bolyai
and Nikolai Lobachevsky who
both independently explored
the potential of hyperbolic
geometry and curved spaces.
The German Bernhard Riemann worked on a different kind of non-Euclidean
geometry called elliptic geometry, as well as on a generalized theory of all the different
types of geometry. Riemann, however, soon took this even further, breaking away
completely from all the limitations of 2 and 3-dimensional geometry, whether flat or
curved, and began to think in higher dimensions. Although the roots of the computer go
back to the geared calculators of Pascal and Leibniz in the 17th Century, it was Charles
Babbage in 19th Century England who designed a machine that could automatically
perform computations based on a program of instructions stored on cards or
tape. Another 19th Century Englishman, George Peacock, is usually credited with the
invention of symbolic algebra, and the extension of the scope of algebra beyond the
ordinary systems of numbers.
This recognition of the possible existence of non-arithmetical algebras was an
important steppingstone toward future developments in abstract algebra. In the mid-
19th Century, the British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra, in which the
only operators were AND, OR and NOT, and which could be applied to the solution of
logical problems and mathematical functions. Boolean algebra was the starting point of
modern mathematical logic and ultimately led to the development of computer
science. The concept of number and algebra was further extended by the Irish
mathematician William Hamilton, whose 1843 theory of quaternions.
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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Quaternions, and its later
generalization by Hermann
Grassmann, provided the first
example of a non-commutative
algebra and showed that several
different consistent algebras may be
derived by choosing different sets of
axioms. Throughout the 19th
Century, mathematics in general
became ever more complex and
abstract. In the first decades of the
century, the Bohemian priest Bernhard
Bolzano was one of the earliest mathematicians to begin instilling rigour into
mathematical analysis, as well as giving the first purely analytic proof of both the
fundamental theorem of algebra and the intermediate value theorem, and early
consideration of sets . Many other concepts are also named after him, including the
Möbius configuration, Möbius transformations, the Möbius transform of number
theory, the Möbius function and the Möbius inversion formula.
Felix Klein‟s 1872
Erlangen Program, which
classified geometries by their
underlying symmetry
groups , was a hugely influential
synthesis of much of the
mathematics of the day, and his
work was very important in the
later development of group
theory and function theory. The
Norwegian mathematician
Marius Sophus Lie also applied
algebra to the study of
geometry. He largely created the
theory of continuous
symmetry, and applied it to the geometric theory of differential equations by means of
continuous groups of transformations known as Lie groups. In the later 19th
Century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory, which enabled the
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity, and which has since become the common
language of nearly all mathematics.
In 1881, the
Englishman John Venn
introduced his “Venn
diagrams” which
become useful and
ubiquitous tools in set
theory. Hermann
Minkowski, a great
friend of David Hilbert
and teacher of the young Albert Einstein, developed a branch of number theory called
the «geometry of numbers» late in the 19th Century as a geometrical method in multi-
dimensional space for solving number theory problems, involving complex concepts
such as convex sets, lattice points and vector space. Later, in 1907, it was Minkowski
who realized that the Einstein‟s 1905 special theory of relativity could be best
understood in a four-dimensional space, often referred to as Minkowski space-time. In
his attempt to show that mathematics grows out of logic, he devised techniques that
took him far beyond the logical traditions of Aristotle.
He extended Boole„s
“propositional logic” into a
new “predicate logic”
and, in so doing, set the
stage for the radical
advances of Giuseppe
Peano, Bertrand Russell
and David Hilbert in the
early 20th Century. Henri
Poincaré came to
prominence in the latter
part of the 19th Century
with at least a partial
solution to the “three body
problem”, a deceptively
simple problem which had stubbornly resisted resolution since the time of Newton, over
two hundred years earlier. Although his solution actually proved to be erroneous, its
implications led to the early intimations of what would later become known as chaos
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
theory. In between his important work in theoretical physics, he also greatly extended
the theory of mathematical topology, leaving behind a knotty problem known as the
Poincaré conjecture which remined unsolved until 2002.
Poincaré was also an engineer and a polymath, and perhaps the last of the great
mathematicians to adhere to an older conception of mathematics, which championed a
faith in human intuition over rigour and formalism. The 20th Century would belong to the
specialists.
3.4 20th Century Mathematics
The 20th Century
continued the trend of the
19th towards increasing
generalization and
abstraction in
mathematics, in which the
notion of axioms as «self-
evident truths» was largely
discarded in favour of an
emphasis on such logical
concepts as consistency
and completeness. It also
saw mathematics become a
major profession, involving
thousands of new
Ph. Although they came close, they too were defeated by that most intractable of
problems, but Hardy is credited with reforming British mathematics, which had sunk to
something of a low ebb at that time, and Ramanujan proved himself to be one of the
most brilliant minds of the century. Others followed techniques dating back millennia but
taken to a 20th Century level of complexity.
The early 20th Century also saw the beginnings of the rise of the field of
mathematical logic, building on the earlier advances of Gottlob Frege, which came to
fruition in the hands of Giuseppe Peano, L. Whitehead, whose monumental joint work
the «Principia Mathematica» was so influential in mathematical and philosophical
logicism. The century began with a historic convention at the Sorbonne in Paris in the
summer of 1900 which is largely remembered for a lecture by the young German
mathematician David Hilbert in which he set out what he saw as the 23 greatest
unsolved mathematical problems of the day. These «Hilbert problems» effectively set
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
BSEd Math 1 Concepcion, Iloilo Professor
SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
the agenda for 20th Century mathematics, and laid down the gauntlet for generations of
mathematicians to come. Hilbert was himself a brilliant mathematician, responsible for
several theorems and some entirely new mathematical concepts, as well as overseeing
the development of what amounted to a whole new style of abstract mathematical
thinking.
He was unfailingly optimistic about the future of mathematics, famously declaring
in a 1930 radio interview «We must know. We will know!», and was a well-loved leader
of the mathematical community during the first part of the century. However, the
Austrian Kurt Gödel was soon to put some very severe constraints on what could and
could not be solved, and turned mathematics on its head with his famous
incompleteness theorem, which proved the unthinkable – that there could be solutions
to mathematical problems which were true but which could never be proved. Emmy
Noether, a German Jew who was also forced out of Germany by the Nazi regime, was
considered by many to be the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
John von Neumann is considered one of the foremost mathematicians in modern
history, another mathematical child prodigy who went on to make major contributions to
a vast range of fields. In addition to his physical work in quantum theory and his role in
the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear physics and the hydrogen
bomb, he is particularly
remembered as a pioneer of
game theory, and
particularly for his design
model for a stored-program
digital computer that uses a
processing unit and a
separate storage structure
to hold both instructions and
data, a general architecture
that most electronic
computers follow even
today. Another
American, Claude
Shannon, has become
known as the father of information theory, and he, von Neumann and Alan Turing
between them effectively kick-started the computer and digital revolution of the 20th
Century. His early work on Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic resulted in his
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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foundation of digital circuit design in 1937 and a more robust exposition of
communication and information theory in 1948.
He also made important contributions in cryptography, natural language
processing and sampling theory. The Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov is
usually credited with laying the modern axiomatic foundations of probability theory in the
1930s, and he established a reputation as the world‟s leading expert in this field. He
also made important contributions to the fields of topology, intuitionistic
logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational
complexity. Perhaps the greatest heir to Weil‟s legacy was Alexander Grothendieck, a
charismatic and beloved figure in 20th Century French mathematics.
Grothendieck was a structuralist, interested in the hidden structures beneath all
mathematics, and in the 1950s he created a powerful new language which enabled
mathematical structures to be seen in a new way, thus allowing new solutions in
number theory, geometry, even in fundamental physics. His «theory of schemes»
allowed certain of Weil„s number theory conjectures to be solved, and his «theory of
topoi» is highly relevant to mathematical logic. Although, after the 1960s, Grothendieck
all but abandoned mathematics for radical politics, his achievements in algebraic
geometry have fundamentally transformed the mathematical landscape, perhaps no
less than those of Cantor, Gödel and Hilbert, and he is considered by some to be one of
the dominant figures of the whole of 20th Century mathematics. Paul Erdös was another
inspired but distinctly non-establishment figure of 20th Century mathematics.
The immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian mathematician worked
with hundreds of different collaborators on problems in combinatorics, graph
theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and
probability theory. Since this result, all modern mathematical proofs must insert a
statement declaring whether or not the result depends on the continuum hypothesis. In
additon to complex dynamics, another field that benefitted greatly from the advent of the
electronic computer, and
particulary from its ability to
carry out a huge number of
repeated iterations of simple
mathematical formulas which
would be impractical to do by
hand, was chaos
theory. Chaos theory tells us
that some systems seem to
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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exhibit random behaviour even though they are not random at all, and conversely some
systems may have roughly predictable behaviour but are fundamentally unpredictable in
any detail.
An early pioneer in modern chaos theory was Edward Lorenz, whose interest in
chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction. Lorenz‟s
discovery came in 1961, when a computer model he had been running was actually
saved using three-digit numbers rather than the six digits he had been working with, and
this tiny rounding error produced dramatically different results. 1976 saw a proof of the
four colour theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to
be proved using a computer. John Nash, the American economist and mathematician
whose battle against paranoid schizophrenia has recently been popularized by the
Hollywood movie «A Beautiful Mind», did some important work in game
theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations which have provided
insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily
life, such as in market economics, computing, artificial intelligence, accounting and
military theory.
The Englishman John Horton Conway established the rules for the so-called
«Game of Life» in 1970, an early example of a «cellular automaton» in which patterns of
cells evolve and grow in a grid, which became extremely popular among computer
scientists. He has made
important contributions to
many branches of pure
mathematics, such as
game theory, group
theory, number theory and
geometry, and has also
come up with some
wonderful-sounding
concepts like surreal
numbers, the grand
antiprism and monstrous
moonshine, as well as
mathematical games such as Sprouts, Philosopher‟s Football and the Soma
Cube. Other mathematics-based recreational puzzles became even more popular
among the general public, including Rubik‟s Cube and Sudoku , both of which
developed into full-blown crazes on a scale only previously seen with the 19th Century
fads of Tangrams and the Fifteen puzzle . In 1952, an early computer known as SWAC
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
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SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
identified 2257-1 as the 13th Mersenne prime number, the first new one to be found in
75 years, before going on to identify several more even larger.
With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime
Search , a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available computer
software to search for Mersenne primes, has led to another leap in the discovery
rate. The P versus NP problem, introduced in 1971 by the American-Canadian Stephen
Cook, is a major unsolved problem in computer science and the burgeoning field of
complexity theory, and is another of the Clay Mathematics Institute‟s million dollar
Millennium Prize problems. At its simplest, it asks whether every problem whose
solution can be
efficiently checked by a
computer can also be
efficiently solved by a
computer . The solution
to this simple enough
sounding
problem, usually known
as Cook‟s Theorem or
the Cook-Levin
Theorem, has eluded
mathematicians and
computer scientists for
40 years.
A possible solution by Vinay Deolalikar in 2010, claiming to prove that P is not
equal to NP, has attracted much attention but has not as yet been fully accepted by the
computer science community. The Chinese-born American mathematician, Yitang
Zhang, working in the area of number theory, achieved perhaps the most significant
result since Perelman, when he provided a proof of the first finite bound on gaps
between prime numbers in 2013.
IV. Summary
Through the discussion above, mathematics has a different approach and
interpretations from the different ages‟ civilizations. Those three periods mentioned also
had different number system.
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
BSEd Math 1 Concepcion, Iloilo Professor
SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
V. Learning Assessment:
Name:_________________________ Date:___________
Course & Year___________________ Score:__________
Module 1, Lesson 5
Prehistoric Mathematics
1. Complete the Table by writing the numbers on the periods indicated:
Period Mathematician
18th Century period
19th Century period
20th Century period
2. What is Quaternion Theory?
3. How does the Quaternion used in ancient time?
4. List down all the contributions of the famous mathematician on the three periods
discussed.
VI. Enrichment Activity
Name:_________________________ Date:___________
Course & Year___________________ Score:__________
Module 1, Lesson 5
Prehistoric Mathematics
1. Complete the table:
Period Contributions
18th Century period
19th Century period
20th Century period
End of Module 1, Lesson 5
Reference:
Mastin, L. (2020). The Story of Mathematics. Retrieved at August 7, 2020 from
[Link]
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
BSEd Math 1 Concepcion, Iloilo Professor
SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
Activity Worksheet 1
Name:_________________________ Date:___________
Course & Year___________________ Score:__________
Professor: SOLIMAR L. AMABLE, Ed.D.
Module 1, Lesson 5
Prehistoric Mathematics
Complete the table:
Period Contributions
18th Century period
19th Century period
20th Century period
NORTHERN ILOILO POLYTECHNIC STATE COLLEGE
Math 101: History of Mathematics CONCEPCION CAMPUS Solimar L. Amable Ed. D
BSEd Math 1 Concepcion, Iloilo Professor
SY 2021-2022 Concepcion, Campus
Assessment Worksheet 1
Name:_________________________ Date:___________
Course & Year___________________ Score:__________
Module 1, Lesson 5
Prehistoric Mathematics
1. Complete the Table by writing the numbers on the periods indicated:
Period Mathematician
18th Century period
19th Century period
20th Century period
2. What is Quaternion Theory?
3. How does the Quaternion used in ancient time?
4. List down all the contributions of the famous mathematician on the three periods
discussed.
