Modern Mathematics

Iulia Maria Magui

Giulia Maria Roșu

Dalia Săraru

Iulia Georgiana Uncruț

History of mathematics in the House of Wisdom�

Established as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late eighth century and then transformed into a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom drew scientists from all over the world to Baghdad, provoking its vivid intellectual curiosity and thirst for freedom of expression.

An archive as impressive as the current British Library in London or the National Library in Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unparalleled center for the study of the humanities and natural sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and some more controversial topics such as alchemy and astrology.

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• Modern mathematics appeared in the House of Wisdom.
• Ancient societies needed mathematics, they could not have existed without mathematics.

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Modern Mathematics in Europe

In order to trace the mathematical legacy of the House of Wisdom, we need to take a little trip back in time. Hundreds of years before the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, a name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo of Pisa, who after his death became known as the Fibonacci.

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The Italian mathematician was born in Pisa in 1170. He received his initial training in Bugia, a commercial enclave located on the African coast of Barberia (the coastal part of North Africa). At the age of 20, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, fascinated by ideas coming from western India through Persia. Arriving in Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works describing the Indo-Arabic number system.

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When Liber Abbaci first appeared in 1202, Indo-Arabic figures were known to only a few intellectuals; European traders and scholars still used Roman numerals, making multiplication and division extremely cumbersome (try multiplying MXCI by LVII).

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The Evolution of Mathematics

• Fibonacci's book demonstrated the use of numbers in arithmetic operations, methods that can be applied to solve practical problems such as profit margins, income change, weight conversion, barter and interest.
• Suddenly, math was available to everyone in an easy-to-use form. In fact, Liber Abbaci relied almost exclusively on the algorithms of the ninth-century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. His revolutionary treatise first presented a systematic way of solving quadratic equations. For this reason, it is said that Al-Khwarizmi is in fact the father of algebra.
• Roman numerals, left over from symbolic names, somehow survived despite the introduction of Al-Khwarizmi's system, which relied on the position of numbers to represent quantities. Like the towering monuments on which they were inscribed, the Roman numerals have survived the empire that gave birth to them, whether by chance, feeling or intention, no one can say for sure.

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Mathematics in the contemporary and modern era

In the 19th century, David Hilbert and Georg Cantor developed an axiomatic theory of the fundamental search for mathematics. This development of axiomatics will lead in the twentieth century to the definition of all mathematics with the help of a single language: mathematical logic.

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The twentieth century witnessed a specialization in the fields of mathematics, the birth and development of many new branches, such as: spectral theory, algebraic topologies or algebraic geometry. Informatics has had a strong impact on research. On the one hand, it facilitated communication between researchers and the dissemination of findings, on the other hand, it provided a very powerful tool for testing theories.

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Mathematics is now increasingly becoming a universal auxiliary of the other sciences

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