The Story of One is a documentary that was released in 2005 about the history of numbers, and most importantly, the number one. Terry Jones teaches us about the history and evolution of the number one in a fun and easy to learn way. The film starts off in Africa, where bones were discover with notches on them. There’s no way for scientists to exactly know whether or not these notches were used for counting. They could have perhaps been used as tally marks to add up and count things. Jones then goes on to teach us about the Ishango bone. Scientists believe this bone must have been used for counting, because there are 60 scratches on each side of it. Jones declares this defining moment in the history of mathematics as "the birth of one”. We …show more content…
This was where the first idea of written numbers was created. The Egyptian numbers system went like this: one was a line, ten was a rope, a hundred was a coil of rope, a thousand was a lotus, ten thousand was a commanding finger, and a million was the symbol of a prisoner begging for forgiveness. The Egyptians were also the first to create what is known today as a modern day ruler. The length from a man’s elbow to his fingertip plus the length of his palm was equal to what they decided to represent as one. They created this standard unit of measurement so that all buildings were constructed equally, in particularly the pyramids. Jones then journeyed to Greece in 520 BC during the time of Pythagoras. In Greece, mathematician Marcus de Sautoy Pythagoras began to obsess over numbers, his secret society, and the Pythagorean Theorem. Pythagoras believed that all things could be measured in units. In his studying he was attempting to measure the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle, in units comparative to the two legs of the triangle. After obsessing over this idea for a large some of time, he unfortunately came to the discovery that his idea was incorrect and