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The oldest known mathematicianToday mathematicians do wondrous things, allowing engineers to let us communicate, fly into space, protect our security, and get us from point A to B. As with art and culture, mathematicians forge new paths by building on the work of those preceding them, or as Newton might have said, by standing on the shoulders of giants. When looking at the giants of mathematics, we go back in time spanning virtually all cultures, from Wiles (b.1953) to Lagrange (1736-1813) to Fermat (1601-1655) to Fibonacci (1170-1250) to al-Khwarizmi (790-850) to Liu Hui (220-280) to Euclid (325 BC-265 BC) to Baudhayana (800 BC-740 BC) to Ahmes (~1680 BC-~1620 BC). Each of these mathematicians was remarkable in his own right (I happened to have selected only men for the sample; please see the September 2006 Tidbit for a biography of Ada Byron). Ahmes in particular was known for his work scribing a collection of problems in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, weights and measures, business, and recreational diversions. That's impressive for work done 3,700 years ago. But mathematicians apparently lived 70,000 years ago in a place called Blombos Cave off the coast of South Africa. According to Science Magazine, they carved stones there with a complex geometric array of carved lines, suggesting capacity - and development - of abstract thought and symbolic language. As our children (and often enough their parents and educators!) struggle with learning basic math facts, the distributive law, 3-D geometry, algebra, trigonometry, probability and statistics, calculus et al, it's refreshing to know that we are all simply continuing a human quest for knowledge that goes back at least 70,000 years.
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