Stephanie Yates

Numbers are present in every aspect of our daily lives. Whether we are making a phone call on our cell phones, calculating the waiter’s tip at dinner or counting pairs of socks to make sure none of them disappeared in the laundry the use of numbers is evident. It is easy to take them for granted considering how prevalent they are in the world today. But this wasn’t always the case. In fact numbers originated out of necessity. As human’s mental capabilities increased, so did our comprehension of numbers. Numbers first came about in pre-civilization, the time before history was recorded. This era of numbers dates back to around 600,000 B.C. Later, the Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians evolved the use of numbers from mere counting to incorporate it into the daily lives of their society members. In addition they also began to utilize numbers to create formulas and to use numbers more abstractly, beyond their everyday usage. This segways into the modern world where axioms and theories were invented to further abstract the idea of numbers. Such advancements lead to mathematics. It was crudely used by the Egyptians, Greeks and Babylonians, but today the scope of mathematics is unparalleled and has helped mankind build the civilization we live in today.