• Question: Who created math?

    Asked by toft534dote63 on 27 Oct 2025. This question was also asked by yeas534dote63.
    • Photo: Lucy Rycroft-Smith

      Lucy Rycroft-Smith answered on 27 Oct 2025:

      I think this depends very much on how you define ‘math’! I see it as ‘ways that humans and other animals make sense of, count, measure, find patterns and relationships and use them to analyse or predict’ – so I don’t see it as ‘created’, but more just a way of looking at things. What do you think?

    • Photo: Amy Mason

      Amy Mason answered on 27 Oct 2025:

      No one person created maths; it’s like asking who invented art – it’s a natural thing for humans to work out to be able to manage understanding and playing with the world around them.

      We do know some of what different parts of maths were invented by a particular times, although not always the exact person.
      We first find tally sticks, a way of counting and recording numbers, ~35,000BC in Africa. Multiplication and prime numbers appear in Egypt in 20,000 BC.
      The first known full number system and fixed weights/measures is in Mesopotamia (West Asia) 3400BC; 1.5 thousand years later in 2000BC the same area gives us the first approximation of pi.
      Back to Egypt in 1650BC, we get the first solution of a quadratic equation.
      The first individually named mathematics inventor is Yajnavalkya ~1000-500BC, in India, decribes the movements of the sun and moon.
      Pythagoras, the oldest mathematician whose name you are likely to hear at school, turns up in Greece in 530BC and works on geometry and numbers.

      ( I’m summarising from Wikipedia’s timeline of mathematics, if you want to look for more detail)

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