It’s humbling to realize that much of high-school math, so vexing to so many of us, was already well understood thousands of years ago. The Egyptians came nowhere near E=mc2, but they knew how to find the volume of a pyramid. The Greeks didn’t conjure up calculus, but they did determine the area of a circle and proved it. Seen in historical context, these calculations are hardly less impressive than those of Einstein or Newton.
The modern world, with its digital computers and internal combustion engines, is built upon the exploration of numberphiles. Fortunately for us, they’ve been at it a long time.
“With the possible exception of astronomy, mathematics is the oldest and most continuously pursued of the exact sciences,” wrote the late David Burton, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, in The History of Mathematics.
Here are a few of antiquity’s greatest mathematical achievements, drawn from some of the earliest writings on the subject.
