Math Help

Math is one of those subjects that drive children insane in school. As the years have passed, math has changed from the simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to more complex subjects as trigonometry and calculus. Some professions require people to have more advanced skills than others, such as drafting and architecture. Depending on the type of field a person wishes to go into determines the level of math that is required.

History of Math

Since the dawn of time, math has been a part of everyday life in some form or another, even before anything was recorded in writing. Palaeontologists found drawings in caves in South Africa dating back to 70,000 BC indicating that primitive man had knowledge of math and time based on the movement of stars. The drawings were geometric patterns scratched into the rock. Discoveries in France also indicate that early man was trying to quantify the concept of time.

Some of the evidence includes the scratching of twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty scratches on a piece of bone which scientists believe were ancient women tracking their monthly cycles. There is also evidence that hunters understood the idea of herds and could comprehend the idea of one, two, many, none, and zero when looking at animals.

Designs such as the many megalithic monuments found in England and Scotland date back to the Bronze Age and the circles, ellipses and triples in their design are also signs that primitive man understood the theory behind math. Ancient Indians in India and Pakistan were the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures that utilized the basics of the decimal system. The streets were laid out with perfect right angles, and some of the ancient artefacts found in the Indian Pakistani city were decimal rulers, compasses made out of sea shells, navigational tools that measured the stars, and other items that had clear mathematical use.

The earliest evidence of mathematics in China dates back to the Shang Dynasty, circa 1600-1046 BC. Tortoise shells were found with numbers scratched upon the surface and it is believed the numbers indicate a decimal system of some type. Based on the artefacts, this was the most advanced system used in the world at the time and allowed people knowledgeable in it to carry out complex equations on the abacus, which was invented around 190 AD.

The Middle East, the area once known as Babylon and included the peoples of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Sumeria, was a hotbed of study for early mathematics. It eventually merged with the forms used by the Greeks and Egyptians, and eventually the entire area became an important centre of study for Islamic mathematics. Everything scientists know about Babylonian math comes from the four hundred plus tablets that have been unearthed since the 1850s. They are written in Cuneiform script and some of the tablets might actually be graded homework ‘papers’ of ancient students. The Sumerians were some of the first to use multiplication and division tables, geometry exercises, fractions, algebra, trigonometry, and the method of solving linear equations. Modern math gets the concept of 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a circle, and sixty seconds in a minute from Babylonian math, which was written using a base-60 numeral system.

Egyptian math that has been discovered consists of word problems that were probably used more to entertain than teach. On in particular, though, was actually a method for finding the volume of a frustum, the portion of a solid that lies between two parallel planes that cuts the solid in half. The Rhind papyrus was basically a math textbook, teaching people how to do arithmetic, geometry, and other basic and complex concepts.

The Iron Age saw the onset of Vedic mathematics, practiced and developed in ancient India. Texts on solving Pi, geometry using prime numbers, cube roots, square roots, linear equations, and numerical proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, were all produced by ancient Indians. Panini was the formulator of grammar used in Sanskrit and his notations were similar to modern math. Many of the theories and math forms Panini worked out has come to be the basis of many computer programming languages today. By 200 AD, the methods for set theory, indices, and other equations were laid out for use.

The Greeks’ contribution to mathematics was just as great as all the others, but many of the theorems, methods, and uses of geometry and algebra back in ancient times were used across the Mediterranean and Middle East interchangeably. The Greeks introduced the concept of deductive reasoning to the world, using logic to get conclusions our various definitions and axioms used at the time.

The Chinese could actually be considered the founders of modern day architectural math. The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts is a full text that includes problems involving agriculture, business, and geometry to determine construction sizes for Chinese pagodas, engineering, surveying and right triangles. The Chinese also did work on Pi and many astronomical measurements still used today. They were the discoverers of negative numbers and binomial theory, calculus, permutations, and even battle formations. The methods of math used and discovered by the Chinese were brought back to Europe by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

While math was thriving and constantly growing in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Chine, Medieval Europeans had other ideas, and their math was taken in a different direction based on the belief that all things were to be measured, numbered, and weighed. By 1254, math was once again being discovered in Europe and the Hindu-Arabic numerals were introduced to Europeans. Analysis of local motion and speed was developed.

The first math text book was printed in 1472 and mathematics began to develop swiftly thanks to contributions from the physical sciences. Trigonometry became a major branch of the mathematical world due to the need for accurate maps that covered large areas, and by the end of the century, mathematicians had begun using Hindu-Arabic numerals and notation that has lasted though to today with little variation.

By the 17th century, men like Galileo and Tycho Brahe had begun to use math to not only map the night sky, but also gauge the distance of other planets in the solar system from earth. Johannes Kepler formulated the mathematical law of planetary motion and Isaac Newton revealed his laws of physics, finding the study and concepts now known as calculus.

When the 19th century came to a close, abstract math concepts had come to the forefront, including the functions of complex variables, convergence of series, algebra, and reciprocity law as developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss. Hyperbolic geometry was discovered and introduced to the world as well as Boolean algebra, a form where only 0 and 1 was used. This became the basis of binary functions in modern day computer sciences.

The twentieth century saw so many new developments that only the most abstract are ever spoken about. The profession of mathematician became popular and many people were able to secure jobs as teachers or industrial advisers in the field. Logic, topology, complexity theory, and game theory were all new areas to be explored and discovered, and by 1976 the computer was being used more and developed into better machines based on the mathematical research of the past.

Now in the 21st century, math has come so far that it is being used in science, engineering, and technology in ways ancient founders of math would never have dreamed of. There is a fear by some that students today will become math illiterate due to the introduction of computers into society, but there are still many people taking advanced math classes in their higher education classes to assuage some of those fears.

Trigonometry-what?

Nowadays children are taught more complex math that their parents, leaving the parents with the difficult task of having to brush up on their own skills before they can help their children. Many parents never took or learned complex math like trigonometry and calculus. In cases like this, the student sometimes winds up helping the parent.

No matter what age they are, people occasionally need math help. Most people, unless in a field where higher math is needed and used on a daily basis, use the most simple arithmetic functions to get through their day to day activities. Balancing a check book, keeping track of how much is spent at the grocery store, even figuring up sales tax for an item uses only the simplest math that everyone learned in elementary school.

So what happens when a parent or a student needs help to get through a math mess? Where do people go? Anyone with a computer can go on line and find math help in a variety of different ways, from worksheets to math games and for just about every type of math that is taught in schools today. Others can get tutoring, either through their local schools, privately or with organizations such as Kumon. While tutoring won’t help the parent understand what is going on, the child can get help through a professional service who does know. A lot of times tutors know tricks to make the math click in a student’s head.