1.3 Geometry
(a)Where in the world do we find some early evidence of geometry? (1)
(b)Approximately to what year does this evidence date back? (1)
(c)Give detail of how geometry was practiced in your example.( 2)
The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to early peoples, who discovered obtuse triangles in the ancient Indus Valley (see Harappan mathematics), and ancient Babylonia (see Babylonian mathematics) from around 3000 BC. Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles, areas, and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction, astronomy, and various crafts. Among these were some surprisingly sophisticated principles, and a modern mathematician might be hard put to derive some of them without the use of calculus and algebra . For example, both the Egyptians and the Babylonians were aware of versions of the Pythagorean theorem about 1500 years before Pythagoras and the Indian Sulba Sutras around 800 BC contained the first statements of the theorem; the Egyptians had a correct formula for the volume of a frustum of a square pyramid.
ca. 2000 BC – Scotland, carved stone balls exhibit a variety of symmetries including all of the symmetries of Platonic solids.
1800 BC – Moscow Mathematical Papyrus, findings volume of a frustum
1650 BC – Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, copy of a lost scroll from around 1850 BC, the scribe Ahmes presents one of the first known approximate values of π at 3.16, the first attempt at squaring the circle, earliest known use of a sort of cotangent, and knowledge of solving first order linear equations
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