Encyclopedia Of Mathematics

Mathematics is often presented as a large collection of disparate facts to be absorbed (memorized!) and used only with very specific applications in mind. Yet the development of mathematics has been a journey that has engaged the human mind and spirit for thousands of years, offering joy, play, and creative invention. The Pythagorean theorem, for instance, although likely first developed for practical needs, provided great intellectual interest to Babylonian scholars of 2000 B.C.E., who hunted for extraordinarily large multidigit numbers satisfying the famous relation a2 + b2 = c2.