Sept 20 Babylonian Word Problems

It is quite interesting to see that many ancient cultures, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, and Chinese were able to think about and devise mathematical problems without any of the discoveries/technology we have today. Indeed their problems were devised based on practicality so it may prove useful to them. Other times it wasn't necessarily how realistic/practical it was, but using ideas that we can abstractly generate in our minds that could work in a different world. The problem is that if it doesn't make sense realistically (shooting an arrow off the moon) it gives people an impression that such knowledge is useless, so it is better to apply it using more appropriate examples instead (shooting an arrow in a space with no air friction). The point is to exercise our minds and train our brain to think in different ways. The same mathematical concepts were discovered by cultures all over the world that didn't have interactions with teachers back then, hence math is considered a universal notion. For me, pure math is proof based using rigorous axioms and theory build ups, whereas applied math is using what is learned and constructing them into problems we face daily or into problems that are imaginable. Conceptualization of these ideas doesn't require what we know about algebra per se. Even young kids can think about what situations math is needed without formal education in the subject. In essence we cannot look at the ancient peoples and say they weren't as smart as we were just because they didn't have the sufficient amount of resources. Instead they were the first ones to discover a lot of mathematical properties that we build off of today. The foundation is important and we should give credit to them for it.