Numbers follow man everywhere. Even our body is in tune with their world - we have a certain number of organs, teeth, hair and skin cells. Counting has become a habitual, automatic action, so it's hard to imagine that once people did not know the numbers. In fact, the history of the emergence of numbers can be traced back to ancient times.
Numbers and primitive people
At some point, a person felt a great need for an account. To this his
pushed by life itself. It was necessary to somehow organize the tribe, sending only a certain number of people to hunt or gather. Therefore, they used their fingers for counting. Until now, there are tribes that instead of the number "5" show one hand, and instead of ten - two. With such a simple counting algorithm, the history of the emergence of numbers began to develop.
To count 40 deer, a primitive man had only to call one fellow tribesman. But this number system became extraordinarily complex if it involved more objects or animals. Therefore, before the appearance of numbers, notches on walls, stones, and other objects were widely used. Sometimes they turned out toolong and cumbersome, which prompted a new idea - to come up with symbols, each of which will be responsible for a certain amount of something.
Numbers and antiquity
The emergence of numbers occurred in each ethnic group in a special way. Yes, ancient
The Mayan people used drawings of scary heads instead of numbers familiar to our eyes.
It is generally accepted that the creation of figures familiar to us is the merit of the Arabs. The very word "number" came to us from the Arabic "syfr" (literally "empty space"). Treatises on numbers in Europe were translated from Arabic, but they only served to spread the decimal number system everywhere.
India has become the true birthplace of conventional numbering. Throughout this country, many different variations of writing numbers were distributed, but at some point, the one that we still use stood out from the total mass. The numbers looked exactly like the first letters in their names in Sanskrit. Subsequently, to indicate an empty digit, a dot or a bold circle, better known to us as "zero", was introduced. It was then that the number system turned into decimal. From this moment, the history of the emergence of natural numbers begins.
Prime numbers
The history of the emergence of numbers allows us to notice that people have long discovered the difference between an odd and even number, as well as various relationships within the numerical expressions themselves. A significant contribution tosimilar
studies were made by the ancient Greeks. For example, the Greek scientist Eratosthenes created a fairly easy way to find prime numbers. To do this, he wrote down the required number of digits in order, and then began to cross out - first all the numbers that can be divided by two, then - by three. The result was a list of digits that are not divisible by anything except one and itself. This method was called the "sieve of Eratosthenes" due to the fact that the Greeks did not cross out, but gouged out unnecessary numbers on tablets covered with wax.
Thus, the history of the emergence of numbers is an ancient and deep phenomenon. According to scientists, it began about 30 thousand years ago. During this time, a lot has changed in a person's life. But the magic of the number still guides our existence.
