Published by: alexa19 (Karma: 4030.48) on 16 September 2010 | Views: 1193
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In all historic times all civilized peoples have striven toward mathematics. The prehistoric origins are as irrecoverable as those of language and art, and even the civilized beginnings can only be conjectured from the behavior of primitive peoples today. Whatever its source, mathematics has come down to the present by the two main streams of number and form. The first carried along arithmetic and algebra, the second, geometry. In the seventeenth century these two united, forming the ever-broadening river of mathematical analysis. We shall look back in the following chapters on this great river of intellectual progress and, in the diminishing perspective of time, endeavor to see the more outstanding of those elements in the general advance from the past to the present which have endured.
