Babylonian Theorem: The Mathematical Journey to Pythagoras and Euclid

A physicist explores the history of mathematics among the Babylonians and Egyptians, showing how their scribes in the era from 2000 to 1600 BCE used visualizations of plane geometric figures to invent geometric algebra, even solving problems that we now do by quadratic algebra. Rudman traces the evolution of mathematics from the metric geometric algebra of Babylon and Egypt-which used numeric quantities on diagrams as a means to work out problems-to the nonmetric geometric algebra of Euclid...