History of Math Day 1

 There were lots of cool facts that I learned from the presentations on Wednesday. One thing that I found most interesting is the fact that almost all mathematical discoveries were made across different regions at different times. Also it is very interesting to see that at times, mathematical knowledge that was lost in certain  regions were kept in different cultures which then gets reintroduced to the same region. In Yi Wei's presentation it was interesting to learn that Chinese first translated Euclid's work and had originally had the word rational numbers which was mistranslated to Japanese as reasonable numbers and came back to China as reasonable numbers instead of its original name. Besides the anecdotal things, I thought that the Indian mathematician in 1300 from Andrew's presentation being able to come up with a version of mean value theorem without any knowledge of Calculus was very impressive. 



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