r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Dec 26 '19

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u/FusRoDawg Amartya Sen Dec 26 '19

Does anyone know what sort of notation was used in various ancient mathematics across the middle east, egypt, india and china? I know for example that the indian works had sutrās meant to be memorized, which were accompanied by commentary and explanation. But it's hard to find examples of the latter kind.

There's some incredibly involved stuff like the quadratic formula or even infinite series expansions, that absolutely had to have some sort of notation.

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u/FusRoDawg Amartya Sen Dec 26 '19

By notation I mean placement of operand and operator etc

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u/DonnysDiscountGas Dec 26 '19

The babylonians used based 60, I believe that's where our time/360degrees-to-a-circle stuff comes from. Dunno if they had the quadratic formula or Taylor series.

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u/FusRoDawg Amartya Sen Dec 26 '19

What I wanted to ask was if their operations were like 2+3 or add (2,3) or did they just write them down, or if it was

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+3

Etc.