Timeline for History of powers beyond squares and cubes
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 23, 2021 at 8:04 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
http -> https (the question was bumped anyway)
|
| Sep 20, 2021 at 1:37 | comment | added | bof | Not a fourth power but a product of four factors occurs in Heron's formula for the area of a triangle. | |
| Sep 26, 2015 at 16:10 | answer | added | Franz Lemmermeyer | timeline score: 18 | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 23:27 | answer | added | R.P. | timeline score: 17 | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 22:49 | answer | added | Amir Asghari | timeline score: 12 | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 8:15 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | Have you checked A History of Greek Mathematics by Thomas Heath online? | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 22:58 | vote | accept | Joseph O'Rourke | ||
| Sep 19, 2014 at 22:56 | comment | added | Joseph O'Rourke | Good point, Moritz! | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 22:19 | comment | added | Moritz Firsching | Maybe this is a bit naive, but after all the Babylonians you mention did use a positional numeral system with base 60. When they ever needed a number larger then 215,999, they will have implicitly used cubes. (And fourth powers if they had to count until 12,960,000.) | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 13:32 | comment | added | Gerald Edgar | I read somewhere (maybe someone has a reference) that in the classical Greek geometry powers 4 and up never appear. Second power is area, third power is volume, and geometry is a theory to describe the real world, so higher powers are nonsense. Or something to that effect. | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 1:45 | answer | added | Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen | timeline score: 21 | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 1:43 | comment | added | The Masked Avenger | I am not a historian, but if the people from early millenia had any concept of four or higher dimensions, I suspect it would be a near-theological conception more than an algebraic or geometric conception. | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 1:37 | comment | added | The Masked Avenger | In geometry, you might look at the history of curves like the parabola, cycloids and variations, tractrix, and so on. If they had any geometric understanding of higher exponents, it would most likely be through such curves. | |
| Sep 19, 2014 at 1:27 | history | asked | Joseph O'Rourke | CC BY-SA 3.0 |