Monthly Archives: July 2014

Jainism (an ancient Indian religion) complied its canonical literature, collections of earlier works from the 6thC BCE onwards, in 450 CE. The image below is one of the founders of Jainism that I took in the Jain temple in Jaisalmer, … Continue reading →

Hasan Thabit ibn Qurra Marwan al-Harrani (c835 – 900 CE) Thabit’s work with number theory was originally in producing commentaries on ancient Greek (and Pythagorean) sources about perfect and amicable numbers. He later derived a formula for generating pairs of … Continue reading →

The ‘classical’ Eurocentric stance taken by historians of mathematics has affected the manner in which the history and potentialities of non-European societies were represented. Mathematical activity outside of Europe was often ignored, devalued and distorted. The possibility of independent, and … Continue reading →

The ‘Russian peasant’ method of multiplication can be traced back to the Egyptians (it is amenable to solution using hieroglyphics), through the Greeks to today where it is still taught in rural communities in Russia and the Middle East. All … Continue reading →

Ethnomathematics (Rambane and Mashige 2007) identified mathematics that is hidden or frozen, that is mathematics that has to be unfrozen from ‘hidden’ or frozen objects and techniques such as basket making, weaving or traditional architecture. They also identified oppressed mathematics, … Continue reading →

An image of notes about modular forms, the Eisenstein series, links with the Weierstrass p function and Klein’s j-invariant. Leading towards the statement ‘the field of modular functions is …’.