A true story of the emergence of numbers

Numbers chase a person everywhere. Even our body is consonant with their world - we have a certain number of organs, teeth, hair and skin cells. The account has become a familiar, automatic action, so it's hard to imagine that once people did not know the numbers. In fact, the history of the emergence of numbers can be traced from the most ancient times.

Numbers and primitive people

At some point a person felt a great need for an account. To this his
Pushed life itself. It was necessary to somehow organize the tribe, sending to hunting or gathering only a certain number of people. Therefore, fingers were used to count. Till now there are tribes which instead of figure "5" show one hand, and instead of ten - two. With such a simple counting algorithm, the history of numbers began to evolve.

To count 40 deer, the primitive man had only to call one of his tribesmen. But this number system became extremely complicated, if it was a question of more objects or animals. Therefore, prior to the onset of numbers, notches on the walls, stones, and other objects were widely used. Sometimes they turned out to be too long and cumbersome, which led to a new idea - to come up with symbols, each of which will be responsible for a certain amount of something.

Numbers and antiquity

The emergence of numbers occurred in each ethnic group in a special way. Thus, the ancient The Maya people used drawings of terrible heads instead of the numbers familiar to our eyes.

It is generally believed that the creation of familiar figures is the merit of the Arabs. The very word "figure" came to us from the Arabic "syfr" (literally "empty space"). Treatises on numbers in Europe were translated from Arabic, but they only served to spread the decimal number system everywhere.

The true homeland of the usual numbering was India. In the whole territory of this country, a lot of different variations of the recording of numbers were distributed, but at some point the total we extracted is the one we use to this day. The numbers looked exactly the same as the first letters in their names in Sanskrit. Subsequently, to indicate an empty discharge, we introduced a point or a fat circle, better known to us as "zero". It was then that the number system turned into a decimal system. From this moment the history of the appearance of natural numbers begins .

Prime numbers

The history of the appearance of numbers makes it possible to notice that people have long ago discovered the difference between an odd and even number, as well as various relationships within the numerical expressions themselves. A significant contribution to such
Studies were made by the ancient Greeks. For example, the Greek scientist Eratosthenes has created a fairly easy way of finding prime numbers. To do this, he wrote down the required number of digits in order, and then began to delete - first all the numbers that can be divided into two, then - by three. As a result, a list of figures was obtained, which are not divisible by anything, except for the unit and yourself. This method was called the "sieve of Eratosthenes" because the Greeks did not erase, but punctured unnecessary numbers on plates covered with wax.

Thus, the history of the appearance of numbers is an ancient and profound phenomenon. According to scientists, it began about 30 thousand years ago. During this time, much has changed in the life of a man. But the magic of the number and to this day directs our being.