Was watching Engineering an Empire on the history channel and the episode was covering the Mayan empire.
They were talking about how the Mayan empire “created” (don’t remember the exact wording used) the concept of zero. Which aided them in the designing and building of their structures and temples. And due to them knowing the concept of zero they were much more advanced than European empires/civilizations. If that’s true then how were much older civilizations able to build the structures they did without the concept of zero?
In: 395
>If that’s true then how were much older civilizations able to build the structures they did without the concept of zero?
Suppose you are going to cross a little stream, and you don’t want to get wet so you decide to lay down a piece of wood, and then walk across on that.
How thick of a piece of wood do you need in order for it to not to break when you walk on it?
If you know some things about the wood, how much you weigh, how wide the crossing is, and can do some math, you can figure out a pretty good answer about exactly how thick the wood needs to be. Then maybe you grab a piece that’s a bit thicker than that, and you have a nice bridge.
Or you can just grab the thickest piece of wood you can find, one that looks like it should probably work. You may end up using a bigger piece than you needed, but often this will work out fine in that you can cross without getting wet.
Or, you can just grab any piece of wood you want, and just accept that sometimes that piece will break and you will fall in the stream. After that bad day, you will know to use a bigger piece for that kind of job. Over time and getting wet a few days, you might get good at guessing how thick of wood you need to cross a stream.
Having a good understanding of math will let you make more complicated structures without wasting thick wood on jobs that don’t need it. But if you’re OK with wasting thick wood, or OK with sometimes having a bridge or building collapse, then you can skip over a lot of the math.
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