Mathematics is now present everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people
do it professionally today. Mathematical methods are used in many fields of
modern science, in natural science, engineering, economics, political science,
sociology, literary studies, management, linguistics and others. Mathematicians,
as A.L. Hammond3
noticed, stay away from public view, they are busy people.
It was not always so. There were cultures without mathematics, for example,
Roman or Indian, in which mathematics was only a part of the religious sphere.
In ancient Egypt mathematics was a part of the occult. In ancient Greece it was
a part of philosophy, in the Middle Ages it was preserved within the walls of
the monasteries, serving mainly to set the dates of movable feasts. Unlike, for
example, in China where the math was on the edge of the culture, in classical
Greece, strongly influenced by the Pythagoreans, it has grown to the status of
a tool to explore the world.