The Mayan civilization made many important achievements in the math world. The created an accurate calendar, a way to represent number, a sign to represent zero and many more.
The first recorded date we have for the Mayans is around 2000BCE in southern Mexico. After a while they started to build burial mounds and step pyramids. “The peak of the Mayan culture was in 900 CE.”(Brown 2).
In 1505 Hernan Cortes left Spain to explore the New World. He left with 11 ships, 506 soldiers and 10 horses. He arrived at the Yucatan Peninsula on Feb 18, 1519. The Mayans that he encountered there offered little hostility towards the explorers. Diego de Landa was 17 years old when he joined Cortes expedition. He is the man who brought the Mayans mathematics to present society. He started out helping the Mayans, spending lots of time throughout their community and protecting them from the Spanish. After a while he started to view them as devil worshipers. He then had all of their idols and writings destroyed. Although later he wrote a book about the Mayans culture.
There were a few documents that survived the destruction ordered by Landan, two of which are the Madrid Codex and the Dresden Codex. Although these artifacts do not say how the Mayans calculated, it does have the results of these calculations, which are incredibly accurate. In the Dresden Codex it has what appears to be a representation of negative numbers. This is supposedly represented by a unit surrounded by a red loop tied with a knot at the top.
The Mayans had a mathematical system that consisted of a cipher system combined with a place value system. This number system was a base 20 system. The thought behind this was that they counted their fingers and toes to a total of twenty. Although this system was not fully a base twenty system, instead of them using a 400’s place there was a 360’s place. The thought behind this is that they wanted to be a close to the days in a year.
There were two basic units that the Mayans used one was a dot, used to represent numbers 1-4, and a bar that was used to represent 5. They combined these two symbols to represent numbers up to twenty. They wrote their number vertically with the lowest denomination on the bottom. The Mayans were the first to come up with the concept of zero. This was commonly represented by a shell.
The most common thought is that the calculations were used to create the calendar. They had two separate calendars; the first one was the “Haab” which was a civil calendar similar to the current day one. The second one was the “Tzolkin” which was the ritual calendar. These two calendars operated separately creating a huge cycle.
http:/www.math.utah.edu/~opstall/3010/mayan.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment