Introduction

The mathematics you're studying has a long history. Ideas behind geometry and trigonometry go back to thousands of years before even the ancient Greeks, all the way to one of the oldest civilizations: ancient Egypt. The annual flooding of the Nile river valley forced the ancient Egyptians to become adept at re-creating farming land boundaries within the fertile flooding zones, making Egyptians the first surveyors, and thus the first people to apply principles of geometry and trigonometry.

Thousands of years later, but still over two thousand years before the present day, Greeks improved upon the Egyptian methods with formal logical geometric proofs, and were the first to consider rational and irrational numbers, including powers and roots and other features of numeration and numbering. It was another thousand years later, during the European "Dark Ages", before algebra was created in Islamic Baghdad, and over 800 years after algebra (or about 300 years before now) before calculus was formulated in both Germany and Britain during the "Age of Enlightenment".

These days we use lots of symbols and notations in mathematics without thinking about their history or original meaning. In fact, knowing the history of mathematics can help in understanding it, like the fact that the Greek letter "π" is our letter "p", the first letter in the word "periphery", which brings to mind the circumference of a circle, which helps define π mathematically. That is why your "quest" on the "web" will be to investigate the origin of many of the mathemtical symbols we use today, as well as other aspects of mathematics history.