Question: Who invented numbers and maths?

Cathal Cummins answered on 12 Nov 2013:

What an excellent question! Well, first off, what we call mathematics today is quite different from what mathematics looked like thousands of years ago. Believe it or not, there are some tribes alive today who don’t have numbers past 5 — they have 1 and 2, but then 3 and 4 are sometimes the same and then the number 5 is the same as “many”!

Mathematics would have been first used for counting using the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …). The first evidence for this dates back over 10,000 years ago to African/European fossils (bones) that have little grooves cut out of them.

More complex maths such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are more difficult to determine when they were invented. However, evidence of their usage has been found, dating back about 4,000 years ago, in what is now known as Iraq. At this time, mathematics was still being used for day-to-day types of calculations for trade and construction.

Things began to change about 2,500 years ago when the Greeks began to “prove” things using mathematics — Pythagoras’ Theorem for example. The idea of proving something was completely new and began a mathematical revolution, which has continued to this day. The Chinese were also proving things but their theorems were expressed as stories and poems!