Now let's look at the beginnings of what led to modern mathematics and arithmetic, with numbers, addition, multiplication,

subtraction. I'm, I'm going to guess some kind of division came in. originally just addition and subtraction. The best evidence we have about how ari, remember that I mentioned counting goes back thousands of years, maybe 35,000 BCE, maybe longer, using piles of pebbles probably, certainly notches on bones, probably notches on sticks. And the notched bones have been found. You have to interpret what they were used for. All sorts of theories out there, seasons and phases of the moon, and things like that. My guess is the one that doesn't get mentioned is probably the one that was the most significant, which is probably was the early monetary system. And I say that because the first real evidence we have for abstract numbers, was money. Why do we have numbers? It was money folks. You want to find new, you want to find out where numbers came from, follow the money[LAUGH]. go back to Sumeria and the fertile crescent region what's now mainly Iraq, and this was about 5,000 BCE. it, it was period that began then, but, but by 5,000 BCE is when we, we definitely have artifacts that we are pretty damn sure, we being the anthropologists, not me. What the anthropologists are pretty sure that what happened then was the invention of numbers and it was for monetary purposes. in other words, you need numbers to have money. Because num, money comes in numerical quantities. One of these, one of those, one of those, ten of these. the interesting thing is you didn't have numbers until you needed money, so the driving force was mediating human transactions of goods. [COUGH] And the essential reason why numbers came on was banking. Okay, it was essentially the invention of banking. It was the first bankers. Bankers were the people essentially who

applied money as mediating quantities in trade. interesting how that has changed, I mean bankers now apply banking to figments of the imagination. >> [LAUGH]. >> But back then, it was too yeah. Back then it was to actual physical goods. But not quite. The vote set in immediately, because immediately you introduce money, you've got something fictitious whose value depends purely on, on human agreement. Okay, here was the evidence, and it was discovered in Iraq by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who I think is now professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. She was here on the Sloan Center on the hill for a year many years ago. but now she was a young anthropologist going out into the fertile crescent region. And all over the place she kept finding these burial sites and these, these ruins of homes and things in which there were piles of clay tokens. Sometimes grouped together in, in ways that suggested some kind of an order. And they were different shapes. some of them looked, recognize but that looks like it might be an oil jar, it looks like it could be a goose. some of them, one of them somewhere looks as it could be a mill for grinding corn or something. Some of that looks[INAUDIBLE] some kind of a pepper corn. So these look as though they might have been tokens. For things that people would trade. Jars of oils, bales of hay, geese, oxen, loaves of bread, and so forth. So, the suspicion was, that these were probably tokens to represent your goods. If you had 5 geese to sell, you maybe had 5 of these tokens to represent them. So the, the supposition was, and this is a reasonable supposition because the Sumerian society was pretty complex. It was getting to be like a modern society. There was structure in, in the society. You know, this was the drive, this was one of the centers of modern civilization coming along. And so the supposition she made was that these were tokens that represented goods. Okay.

And here are some of them and so if you wanted to trade things you wouldn't necessarily have to worry, you would, you have so many sheep and things but may be the sheep be in the field but you have tokens that represented the sheep. So you would instead, so when you sh, you trade, you would swap your tokens for somebody else's oxen tokens, and then the goods would eventually trade. And so the tokens you had in your hand represented the things you owned. That was your bank account, and it was a collection of tokens. Not unlike a pocketful of change, huh? Those were the tokens, except there were different tokens for the different objects with different shapes. Okay, so the next thing you need is a way of keeping your tokens secure because that was a measure of your worth. And so bankers came along to look after your tokens for you, and what they would do is you would go along with it, and now we're just, I'm telling you the story that the anthropologists came up with to explain what was going on. The, you came, you went, you had your tokens, the banks kept your tokens, they would take a sheet of wet clay, put your tokens in the clay, fold it up, and seal it, bake it in the sun, and there was your secure bank account. All nice and secure, locked away. Okay. Now the problem was, of course, if you want to trade, you had to break open the thing. Take out the things, change them, and reseal it. Good business to be in banking. Constant need for bankers to break open the shells and reseal them and put their stamp on them, okay. So already the bankers were there hanging on, taking our money in the process. There's 10% or whatever they would take, so then, Some entrepreneurial person came along and said, you know, it's fine if we crack open the thing when we're actually doing a trade. But if I'm just making a bid on something, I don't want to pay the banker to break this apart and put it together. If I want to just show my worth, why don't I before you seal up this thing take the tokens and press them on the outside, then put them in and seal it. So on the outside of the, of the, of the

sealed envelope, the clay envelope you've got tokens, indentations of the tokens so you don't have to break it open to see how many tokens there are. You just need to look at the indentations. That's an advance, okay? Your worth, so if you, interesting areas of structuring. We've now got real sheep and real geese, and real jars of oil represented by artifacts, tokens. Tokens are then put into a clay envelope and the tokens are now represented by marks on the outside. We're about to invent writing. Writing by the, for those people who like to think that mathematics is supreme, as far as we know, writing numbers came before writing words. Right, it all began with numbers, and it was all about money. So, they put these tokens out, so you've got abstract markers, symbols, representing the token, the tokens represent the objects. So, you're already two steps removed from the real world, and you've got these, these tokens. And that was fine for a while, and then after, you know, and then 1,000 years goes by, and then another entrepreneurial person comes along and says, you know? We don't really need those tokens inside, all you need is 1 token for each kind of object. Because you can use the same, same jar of oil token, three times, if you've got 3 jar's of oil. So you just need different tokens to make these indentations. But it doesn't matter where these tokens are. It's really about the indentations. The tokens don't matter their just like the golden fort knox you know, you and I don't swap the golden fort knox it's just there alright, you just go with the tokens. So, when you do that you can think well in that case I don't really need a clay envelope I can just have a tablet. With marks on it, and here is one of the tablets. So these came later, flat tablets with the different indentations representing in different areas. You know, there would be different things they're representing. it could well be that the stock of the

tokens in different boxes represented different kinds of things. This was presumably some code, but it got sophisticated and we have abstract markings on a piece of clay that represents your net worth. And if that doesn't look familiar, it ought to. >> [LAUGH]. >> 5,000 BCE, we got credit cards,[LAUGH] made out of clay. Okay okay. That according to the anthropologists. This has been sort of, this is pretty well accepted in, in the business. Their business, not my business. I'm, I'm, I'm happy with this. It seems like a good explanation is where we, we have money. Certainly, numbers came out of that area. And this, this, this seems the most plausible explanation given the available evidence. Okay so that's where we get counting numbers, it was for money. But there was another system of numbers. What about the numbers that are used for building pyramids, measuring volumes of things seeing how much land you owe, you own when the Nile delta, this is the Nile Delta. When the Nile Delta floods and you have to remap the thing? there was measurement. That was going on as well. And one of the interesting things about this is to, to modern eyes, those are both systems of numbers. Those give you the natural numbers. And that gives you what we call the real numbers. This is a 19th century, eh, the 1930, 20th century interpretation. These were not thought as numbers. They were quantities, lengths, volumes, interestingly not areas. Areas seem to be cognitively complicated. But lengths, and volumes and quantities, so these were regarded as essentially separate. The Greeks tried to combine them, and when they discovered that you couldn't, the famous discovery that the square root of 2 was irrational, they pushed them apart again, and, and they took that as meaning that you can't marry, marry these with those because of what they call the incommensurables. You simply couldn't use whole numbers to capture this.

Only at the end of the 19th century, 2000 years later, were mathematicians finally able to marry these things together, in a single number system called the real numbers. That's very, very recent, and this is part of why mathematics got interested in concepts and relationships because these guys took a lot of of building. But the reason it took a lot of building was cause of these were regarded as foundational, and yet these, from a cognitive point of view, these are both basic. Human beings have a cognition about quantities, discrete quantities. We, we can count things. We also have sense of lengths and volumes. We have a sense of continuous size. So the human cognitive system captures both and it just took mathematics a long time to marry those in a single system. If you read, read Newton's Principia where he talks about the calculus. He's not talking about numbers, he's talking about quantities. Calculus in Newton's terms. Calculus wasn't applied to numbers, it was applied to lengths and distances. we interpret it today in term's of numbers, but that's because we have a different conception of numbers. >> [MUSIC] Stanford University.