What will count as mathematics in 2100?

What is mathematics today? What is mathematics? That’s one of the most basic questions in the philosophy of mathematics. The answer has changed several times throughout history. Up to 500 B.C. or thereabouts, mathematics was—if it was anything to be given a name—the systematic use of numbers. This was the period of Egyptian, Babylonian, and early Chinese and Japanese mathematics. In those civilizations, mathematics consisted primarily of arithmetic. It was largely utilitarian, and very much of a cookbook variety. (“Do such and such to a number and you will get the answer.”) Modern mathematics, as an area of study, traces its lineage to the ancient Greeks of the period from around 500 B.C. to 300 A.D. From the perspective of what is classified as mathematics today, the ancient Greeks focused on properties of number and shape (geometry). [The word “mathematics ” itself comes from the Greek for “that which is learnable. ” As always when interpreting one culture or age with another, it has to be acknowledged that things often appear quite different to those within a particular culture or age than when viewed from the other.