MAYAN MATHEMATICS

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MAYAN MATHEMATICS
By Joey Stamplis Xuan Si Ken Derek
Strohl
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HISTORY OF MAYAN KNOWLEDGE

• A large number of Mayan documents no longer exist
  today because they were destroyed by a missionary
  named Landa who was sent to the Yucatan peninsula
  to learn about the Mayan people and to protect
  them from their new Spanish masters. Landa
  viewed the hieroglyphics in these documents to be
  the work of the devil. However a small number of
  these Mayan documents did survive the
  destruction. The most important are the Dresden
  Codex now kept in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek
  Dresden the Madrid Codex now kept in the
  American Museum in Madrid and the Paris Codex
  now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. The
  Dresden Codex is a treatise on astronomy, thought
  to have been copied in the eleventh century AD
  from an original document dating from the seventh
  or eighth centuries AD. Through these text
  modern people have greatly changed their
  conceptions of the knowledge of the Mayan
  civilization.

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MAYAN COUNTING

• The Mayans based their
• counting system in terms
• of using 20 as their set
• number. Because the
• Mayans used such as
• small base number they
• heavily relied on multiplying
• and using exponents.
• To the side is a chart of
• Mayan number symbols.

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MAYAN CALENDER

• The Mayans also used this number system for their
  calendar. The Maya had two calendars. One of
  these was a ritual calendar, known as the
  Tzolkin, composed of 260 days. It contained 13
  "months" of 20 days each, the months being named
  after 13 gods while the twenty days were numbered
  from 0 to 19. The second calendar was a 365-day
  civil calendar called the Haab. This calendar
  consisted of 18 months, named after agricultural
  or religious events, each with 20 days (again
  numbered 0 to 19) and a short "month" of only 5
  days that was called the Wayeb. The Wayeb was
  considered an unlucky period and Landa wrote in
  his classic text that the Maya did not wash, comb
  their hair or do any hard work during these five
  days. Anyone born during these days would have
  bad luck and remain poor and unhappy all their
  lives. The odd thing though that the Mayans did
  was they would make their dates based on one
  beginning day, which was August 12, 3113 BC.
  Below is an example of how the Mayans wrote their
  dates.

8143112 is the date given on a plate which
came from the town of Tikal. It translates to 12
1 x 20 3 x 18 x 20 14 x 18 x 202 8 x
18 x 203 which is 1253912 days from the creation
date of 12 August 3113 BC so the plate was carved
in 320 AD.
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Prior Views of Mayan Society

• Although at the time that Europeans first came
  intact with this new culture, the Mayans had been
  in decline for over 600 years. This wasnt known
  at the time and the Mayans were looked onto as
  fierce warriors which Cortés thought would be a
  very dangerous adversary. When Cortés arrived on
  the Yucatan peninsula he was brought gifts along
  with twenty girls. One of which he later married.
  The views quickly changed and Cortés and his
  troops quickly moved on to conquer the Aztecs.

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CURRENT VIEWS OF MAYAN CIVILIZATION

• When people think about the Mayan people, ideas
  of large stone buildings and bazaar religious
  ceremonies come to mind. Although these
  activities did occur it is safe to say that the
  discovery of their complex math system shows that
  they may have been much more intelligent than
  many people give them credit for.