• Question: Who was the first person that solved a math equasion?

    Asked by ears534chay36 on 19 Mar 2026.
    • Photo: Lucy Rycroft-Smith

      Lucy Rycroft-Smith answered on 19 Mar 2026:

      That is a really interesting question! The short answer is we don’t know exactly. Things we do know:
      -everyone’s brain can do maths, and we probably evolved the mathematical part of our brain about the same time we started to use spoken language
      -many different ancient people developed different (but surprisingly similar) ways of writing down symbols to count and measure things
      -we have a bone that is over 20,000 years old with notches on it that might qualify as the first mathematical equation – it has a pattern of notches on it that we think might have been a person counting their menstrual period
      -many of the first ‘mathematicians’ were in Africa and Egypt, according the evidence we do have – doing things that fractions, calculating area, and drawing patterns we call fractals

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