Numbers haunt man everywhere. Even our body is consonant with their world - we have a certain number of organs, teeth, hair and skin cells. The account has become a familiar, 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 the most ancient times.
Numbers and primitive people
At some point, a person felt a great need for an account. On it him
life itself pushed. It was necessary to somehow organize the tribe, sending only a certain number of people to hunt or gather. Therefore, they used fingers on their hands for counting. There are still tribes that show one hand instead of the number “5”, and two instead of ten. With such a simple counting algorithm, the history of the appearance of numbers began to develop.
To count 40 deer, the primitive man had only to call one tribeman. But this number system became unusually complex when it came to a larger number of objects or animals. Therefore, before the occurrence of numbers, nicks on walls, stones, and other objects became widespread. Sometimes they turned out to be too long and bulky, 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. So ancient
Maya people used drawings of scary heads instead of numbers familiar to our eyes.
It is generally accepted that the creation of numbers familiar to us is the merit of the Arabs. The very word "number" came to us from the Arabic language "syphr" (literally translated as "empty space"). The treatises on numbers in Europe were translated precisely from the Arabic language, but they merely served the ubiquity of the decimal system.
The true homeland of conventional numbering has become India. Throughout the territory of this country, many different variations of the notation of numbers were distributed, but at some point, the one we use so far stood out from the total mass. The numbers looked exactly the same as the first letters in their names in Sanskrit. Subsequently, to indicate an empty discharge, we entered a dot or a thick circle, better known to us as “zero”. It was then that the number system turned into a decimal. From this moment begins the history of the occurrence of natural numbers.
Prime numbers
The history of the occurrence of numbers allows us to note that people quite a long time ago discovered the difference between an odd and even number, as well as various relationships within the numerical expressions themselves. A considerable contribution to such
research was made by the ancient Greeks. For example, the Greek scientist Eratosthenes created a fairly easy way to search for 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 is a list of numbers that are not divisible by anything except one and oneself. This method was called the "sieve of Eratosthenes" due to the fact that the Greeks did not cross out, but punctured unnecessary numbers on the plates 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 number still rules our being.