Mathematical stories

The history of mathematics is the area of ​​study of research on the origins of discoveries in mathematics, of the methods of the evolution of their concepts and also, to a certain degree, of the mathematicians involved. The emergence of mathematics in human history is closely related to the development of the concept of number, a process that occurred very gradually in primitive human communities. Although they had a certain capacity to estimate sizes and magnitudes, they initially did not have a notion of number. Thus, numbers beyond two or three had no name, so they used some expression equivalent to "many" to refer to a larger set.

The next step in this development is the appearance of something close to a concept of number, although very incipient, not yet as an abstract entity, but as a property or attribute of a concrete set. Later, the advance in the complexity of the social structure and its relationships was reflected in the development of mathematics. The problems to be solved became more difficult and it was no longer enough, as in the primitive communities, to just tell things and communicate to others the cardinality of the counted set, but it became crucial to count increasingly larger sets, quantify time, operate with dates, allow the calculation of equivalences for barter. It is the moment of the emergence of the names and numerical symbols.

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