MATHS WEEK STARTED yesterday and, as is our annual tradition, we’re setting our readers some puzzles. Give them a go!
Day Two – Patterns and Relationships
We humans seem to have an innate ability to perceive quantities in small sets of objects. Numbers allow us to count and communicate precise amounts, enabling us to consider much larger quantities.
Numbers were developed sometime in prehistory, and this was surely one of the great advances of civilisation.
The Ishango Bone, which appears to have been used for counting and was found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, dates back some 20,000 years. The Sumerians, around 6,000 years ago developed a numerical system in base-60. As we have 10 fingers to count with, the decimal system (base-10) seems obvious to us, but it did not appear until about 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt.
The earliest numbers were the counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.
Fractions …