The history of mathematics

From the Ishango bone to formalized proofs: arithmetic, geometry, algebra, analysis, probability, logic and topology across Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Islamic and European mathematics and beyond. Moments are tagged by area (and colored by it) and by civilization; eras are shown as spans. Ancient dates are approximate and say so. Summaries are our own; each moment links to its Wikipedia articles.

99 moments · 20000-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE – 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z CE · by @athan · @athan

Moments

1. The Ishango bone 20000-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
2. Babylonian sexagesimal numbers 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
3. The Moscow papyrus 1850-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
4. Plimpton 322 1800-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
5. YBC 7289: the square root of two 1700-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
6. The Rhind papyrus 1550-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
7. Thales and deductive geometry 0585-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
8. Pythagoras and his school 0530-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
9. Irrational numbers 0450-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
10. Zeno's paradoxes 0450-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
11. Eudoxus and the method of exhaustion 0370-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
12. Aristotle's logic 0350-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
13. Euclid's Elements 0300-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
14. Archimedes 0250-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
15. Eratosthenes: primes and the Earth 0240-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
16. Apollonius's Conics 0200-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
17. The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art 0150-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
18. Hipparchus and trigonometry 0140-01-01T00:00:00Z BCE
19. Ptolemy's Almagest 0150-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
20. Diophantus's Arithmetica 0250-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
21. Liu Hui's commentary 0263-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
22. Hypatia of Alexandria 0400-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
23. Zu Chongzhi's π 0480-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
24. Aryabhata 0499-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
25. Brahmagupta and zero 0628-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
26. Al-Khwarizmi's algebra 0820-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
27. The House of Wisdom 0830-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
28. Al-Karaji and induction 1000-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
29. Omar Khayyam and the cubic 1070-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
30. Bhaskara II 1150-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
31. Fibonacci's Liber Abaci 1202-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
32. Madhava and infinite series 1400-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
33. Pacioli's Summa 1494-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
34. The cubic and quartic solved 1545-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
35. Viète's symbolic algebra 1591-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
36. Napier's logarithms 1614-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
37. Descartes's La Géométrie 1637-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
38. Fermat's marginal note 1637-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
39. The Pascaline 1642-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
40. Pascal and Fermat found probability 1654-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
41. Newton's fluxions 1666-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
42. Leibniz publishes calculus 1684-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
43. Newton's Principia 1687-07-05T00:00:00Z CE
44. The law of large numbers 1713-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
45. The bridges of Königsberg 1736-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
46. Euler's Introductio 1748-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
47. Bayes's theorem 1763-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
48. Lagrange's Analytical Mechanics 1788-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
49. The fundamental theorem of algebra 1799-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
50. Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae 1801-01-01T00:00:00Z CE