Comment by mcmoor
2 years ago
It's astounding how some of math's first practical applications is to calculate movement of the stars. Absence of frictions and close bodies make physics much easier to approximate than anything on earth. Maybe to have students appreciate math, we should have them predict eclipse one again. God create astronomy to teach humans mathematics.
The oldest writing is numbers... for accounting. I'm pretty sure Pythagoras' theorem was for property boundaries.
Although the oldest mathematical work I'm aware of on accounting is early medieval (al khwarizmi).