Skip to main content
Post Made Community Wiki
Source Link
Neel Krishnaswami
  • 9.2k
  • 1
  • 30
  • 54

A great, simple, invention not on your list is decimal number notation, which made arithmetic operations easy enough to teach to schoolchildren. Likewise, logarithms were what made rigorous engineering (prior to the invention of the computer) possible, since they turned multiplication and division into addition and subtraction, and so made many computations feasible.

More philosophically, Frege's invention of predicate calculus made mathematics itself into a subject fit for mathematical study.