Plot 180 Trivia Quiz

Copied around 1550 BCE by an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus serves as one of the oldest known written documentations of mathematical practice. In it existed such problems as how ancient Egyptian scribes could work out how to divide eighty loaves of bread among ten workers without starting a riot. Named after Alexander Henry Rhind, the Scottish bone collector who purchased it in Luxor in 1858, the papyrus contains eighty-four practical problems covering linear equations, geometry, unit fractions, and area measurements.

Ahmes the scribe showed the rest of the world that human beings have been using geometry and fractions for millennia. Rather than abstract theoretical proofs, the text served as a instructional manual for basic math. It was used for managing agricultural yields, calculating bread and beer rations, and dividing land following the seasonal flooding of the Nile River.

Basically, the Rhind Papyrus is essentially history's oldest surviving math homework assignment. I'd give it a 10/10.

Before Greek-letter societies on university campuses around the world, there was a guy called Pythagoras, and he was an OG, the original Greek. Around 530 BCE, this guy picked up his life in Samos and moved to Croton, in modern-day southern Italy. There, he established a communal philosophical and religious society that worshipped whole numbers, treated geometry like divine revelation, and forbade meat.

The Pythagorean Brotherhood combined mysticism with mathematical investigation, believing that numbers formed the ultimate substance of the universe. The group treated geometric concepts with sacred reverence and established rigorous standards for mathematical proof. Though the famous geometric theorem bearing his name was known earlier to Babylonian builders, the Pythagorean tradition transformed it into a cornerstone of formal Greek mathematics.

Ironically, when one unlucky member discovered irrational numbers like the square root of two, the secret society reportedly threw him off a boat to keep the terrifying truth hidden.

Pi, that wonderfully weird number, related to circles, propagation of waves, Zeta functions, bell curves, and Thanksgiving (you know, as in, I can eat 3.14 slices of those delicious pumpkin and apple pies that you've baked). So, along comes Archimedes and his treatise, the aptly named "Measurement of a Circle", in around 250 BCE. In it, he devised a brilliant method for approximating the exact value of pi.

By inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons around a circle (the circle inside and outside the polygon), he calculated upper and lower boundaries for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Starting with hexagons and progressively doubling the sides until reaching 96-sided polygons, Archimedes rigorously proved that the true value of pi rested between the rational fractions of 223/71 and 22/7. That's about 3.1408 to 3.1428, and a good bound for the actual value! Guess what?! He didn't use a calculator.

This leaves circle lovers everywhere with a mathematical tool that has outlasted the Roman Empire and will outlast "General Hospital".

For centuries, people looked at zero and saw... nothing. It took an Indian astronomer from Europe to realize that nothing was actually something. In 628 CE, Brahmagupta completed his major theoretical work, the "Brahmasphutasiddhanta". In it, he recognized zero as a fully operational mathematical number in its own right.

Brahmagupta also formalized rules for positive numbers (which he called fortunes), negative numbers (which he called debts), and made sure that the place-value system was understood, well, at least in his part of the world at that point.

Written in Baghdad around 820 CE during the Islamic Golden Age, Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi published a landmark text, "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing". The title introduced the Arabic term 'al-jabr', meaning restoration or completion, which referred to the systematic movement of terms across an equation to simplify operations. Sounds familiar? It's algebra!

Al-Khwarizmi provided systematic, step-by-step methods for solving linear and quadratic equations. Mathematics moved away from purely geometric methods toward abstract algebraic procedures, opening up the door for more complex calculations. And where is his recognition today? Well, Westerners managed to mangle the pronunciation into... algorithm.

So, if you ever struggled through high school algebra trying to find the value of x, you can trace your homework back to Baghdad in the ninth century.

Try subtracting MCMXCIV from MMMCDLXXXVIII using traditional Roman numerals without losing your mind. It's MCDXCIV, by the way. Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, going by his stage name, Fibonacci, recognized that Roman numbers were an absolute nightmare, especially in commerce, and came up with a then-controversial but revolutionary idea. Having traveled extensively across North Africa as the son of a customs official, Fibonacci witnessed firsthand the speed and efficiency of the Hindu-Arabic place-value system compared to cumbersome Roman numerals.

In 1202, Fibonacci published "Liber Abaci" (The Book of Calculation). He introduced Europe to the digits 0 through 9, and proved how they could streamline merchant bookkeeping, currency conversions, interest calculations, and measurement tracking. While Europe at that time opposed change, this was one that caught traction and initiated a historic shift toward modern numerical notation.

Though we remember him now for rabbits breeding, Fibonacci saved us from doing long division using symbolic letters. Even though it took a while for people to trust zero, modern arithmetic was officially born.

Legend has it that René Descartes came up with his greatest mathematical breakthrough while lying in bed watching a fly crawl across his ceiling, realizing he could pinpoint its exact location using two intersecting lines. Whether or not this was true, he published "La Géométrie" as an appendix to his famous philosophical work, "Discourse on the Method".

Descartes introduced analytic geometry, bridging the long-standing divide between algebra and classical geometry. By plotting points using perpendicular numerical axes (the Cartesian coordinate system x, y, and z), he showed that geometric curves could be represented by algebraic equations and vice versa.

Think about it this way, every graph you have ever plotted traces back to a lazy morning fly-watching.

What happens when two brilliant geniuses secretly invent the same revolutionary mathematical field at the exact same time? A giant, multi-decade mudslinging match across the English Channel! So, when in the late seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany independently formulated calculus, the mathematical study of continuous change, while it was groundbreaking, it was also a contentious point.

Leibniz published his groundbreaking papers on differential and integral calculus between 1684 and 1686 and brought us notation that is still in use today. Newton, on the other hand, developed his method of fluxions earlier while studying planetary motion and optics, publishing his results in the "Philosophić Naturalis Principia Mathematica" in 1687. Their near-simultaneous discovery sparked a bitter international priority dispute between British and Continental mathematicians.

So, who stole whose homework?

In his 1799 doctoral dissertation at the University of Helmstedt, twenty-two-year-old German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss provided the first rigorous proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (FTA). He delivered an airtight proof showing that every single polynomial equation has at least one root hidden somewhere in the complex number plane.

While earlier mathematicians including d'Alembert and Euler (both mathematical titans in their own right) had attempted proofs, Gauss identified flaws in their work and delivered a sound topological and geometric demonstration. After this, he started calling himself the "Prince of Mathematicians", probably well-deserved, if not a bit ego-driven. In the end, he showed that algebraic equations will always yield answers if you know where to look.

In 1931, young pup Kurt Gödel, only twenty-five years old, dropped a mathematical bombshell that broke logic itself. For decades, scholars believed that with enough time and patience, every single mathematical truth could be formally proven using a perfect set of starting rules. Gödel mathematically proved that this dream was completely impossible. He showed that within any consistent formal axiomatic system capable of performing basic arithmetic, there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be proven using the rules of that system.

Huh, in English now? He showed that in any math system big enough to handle simple addition, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven inside the system. Gödel's work permanently shattered the dream of constructing a complete, self-contained set of axioms to prove every mathematical truth. This was the ultimate mathematical mic drop.