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c. 20,000 BC — Nile Valley, Ishango Bone: suggested, though disputed, as the earliest reference to prime numbers as also a common number. [1] c. 3400 BC — the Sumerians invent the first so-known numeral system, [dubious – discuss] and a system of weights and measures.
The first row has been interpreted as the prime numbers between 10 and 20 (i.e., 19, 17, 13, and 11), while a second row appears to add and subtract 1 from 10 and 20 (i.e., 9, 19, 21, and 11); the third row contains amounts that might be halves and doubles, though these are inconsistent. [14]
The first international, special-interest society, ... the surreal numbers were discovered by John Horton Conway in connection with combinatorial games.
1636 – Muhammad Baqir Yazdi jointly discovered the pair of amicable numbers 9,363,584 and 9,437,056 along with Descartes (1636). [15] 1637 – Pierre de Fermat claims to have proven Fermat's Last Theorem in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. 1637 – First use of the term imaginary number by René Descartes; it was meant to be derogatory.
A prime number, often shortened to just prime, is an integer greater than 1 that is not the product of two smaller positive integers. The first few prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. There is no such simple formula as for odd and even numbers to generate the prime numbers.
ca. 1000 — Abu-Mahmud al-Khujandi first states a special case of Fermat's Last Theorem. 895 — Thabit ibn Qurra gives a theorem by which pairs of amicable numbers can be found, (i.e., two numbers such that each is the sum of the proper divisors of the other).
The son of Aglaos, Eratosthenes was born in 276 BC in Cyrene.Now part of modern-day Libya, Cyrene had been founded by Greeks centuries earlier and became the capital of Pentapolis (North Africa), a country of five cities: Cyrene, Arsinoe, Berenice, Ptolemias, and Apollonia.
Gerolamo Cardano was the first European mathematician to make systematic use of negative numbers. [12] He published with attribution the solution of Scipione del Ferro to the cubic equation and the solution of Cardano's student Lodovico Ferrari to the quartic equation in his 1545 book Ars Magna, an influential work on algebra.