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The Middle East, or the Beginning

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A Brief History of Mathematics

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There is a story in The Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer: after the itinerant hero Odysseus had struck out the eye of the cyclops Polyphemus, the unfortunate creature lived out his days in isolation tending to his sheep from his mountain cave. Each morning as the sheep went out to graze, the blind giant would take out a single stone from a pile and cast it to one side. When they returned to the cave in the evening, he would toss the stones back into the pile one by one.

It must have required many ages to discover that a brace of pheasants and a couple of days were both instances of the number 2: the degree of abstraction involved is far from easy.

Bertrand Russell

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Tianxin Cai

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  1. Tianxin Cai
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Cai, T. (2023). The Middle East, or the Beginning. In: A Brief History of Mathematics. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26841-0_1

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