Mathematics of Mayan people

Some Gatatala Indians, Southern Mexico and Bethlehem today still use Mam, Quiche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi and Myathan languages, which are spoken in more than thirty Mayan languages. The common point of different languages ​​is how to name a very complete, and almost identical, coefficient.

Centuries of colonial regimes and especially the emergence of a market economy have made dialects that refer to numbers replaced by Spanish borrowed words. For decades, people no longer use dialects to call large numbers, and even the names of unit numbers in dialects gradually fade away.

Daily numbers

Archeology gives very little information about the use of numbers in the economy in pre-Christophe Colomb America. However, we know for sure that the Maya coefficient was created by counting on the fingers and toes. For example, in Quiche, the word 20 is huvinak , meaning "whole body". This count in the decimal system: 11 is hulahuh meaning hun (1) plus lahuh (10). The clear numbers used are very similar to the way we use to count today, but the difference is that the Maya must resort to classifying words to describe things counted, indicating clearly which objects are counted. round, long or solid state. For example, talking about cigarettes, the Yucatec people say: "This is hun (one) dzit " (long, cylindrical object) called chamal (cigarette) rather than "this is a cigarette"

Official Sun Calendar

The Mayan calendar was built on the basis of the Sun with 365 days, due to the Mayans inheriting the ancient Zapotecs (at Mont Alban) and Olmecs (at La venta and Tres Zapotes).

Mayan calendar calendar (Photo: posteruniversum)

With a constant length, one year the Sun is divided into 18 months, 20 days per month (using the base counting system 20), the remaining 5 days are taken at the end of the year. Each month there is a name that seems to have nothing to do with the season or festival. The names of the months are traditionally transmitted or may even be borrowed from other languages ​​or other cultures. They are also of historical significance, unlike the name of the month in the current European languages, which originated in Latin but still have some of its meanings.

The days of the month are recorded with the serial number from 0 to 19 before the month name (From 0 to 4 for the missing month, only 5 days for the end of the year). As if, each day is correctly named on the time axis. The years are continuous and there is no leap year.

Calendar of fortune tellers

Mayan hieroglyphs (Photo: mayasite)

In the old days, Indians Quiche, Ixil and Mam still used the traditional 260-day Maya calendar to predict the future. Why is there 260 days? After speculating on many fortune tellers in Chichicastenango and Momstenango, German anthropologist Leohard Schultze Jena found that choosing this length was not random, but because it was consistent with human pregnancy. Regardless of the origin, the twentieth system allows to divide the 260-day year into 13 months, every 20 days. Each day is named with a number from 1 to 13, combined with one of the 20 names of animals, natural forces, abstract concepts or concepts that meaning so far has lost.

Like the solar calendar, the divination calendar has a cycle, the last day of the previous cycle followed by the first day of the next cycle.

Calendar cycle

Permit the 260-day calendar with a 365-day calendar for a 52-year cycle, in which each day is called by a different name. The cycle of 18980 days (52 years of the solar calendar with 365 days a year, or 73 years of the 260-day yearly divination calendar) is known as the largest unit to measure the time of most of the Central American peoples. money period Christophe Colomb. Unlike the Mextec and Aztecs, the Mayans are used to many different counting systems and they use different units to measure longer periods of time, but the Mayans are exceptional in large cultures of the past. Christophe Colomb.

Hieroglyphs

We know that dates are named, and partially multifaceted. Today, many Indian fortune tellers still use their own voices to call that name. Maya people in pre-Christophe Colomb era can write names all day in a calendar cycle with hieroglyphics. There are four books using hieroglyphics left to this day, now stored in Paris, Dresden Madrid and Mexico city.

Countless stone inscriptions, some wall paintings and many decorative ceramics are always admirable materials for this unique writing system.

Maya numbers from 1 to 13 use dots and bricks

The easiest way to write numbers from 0 to 19 is the dots (for units). With larger numbers, one uses a symbol for 20. To write a number greater than 40, the system records the position value used with a special symbol equivalent to our zero. vacant position. Each representative position of lineage 20, until the third position is multiplied by 18, namely: first place 200 = 1; second place 201 = 20; third place 18 x 201 = 360; 18th place x 202 = 7200; fifth place 28 x 203 = 144000, etc. .

Count the days

Very soon, and no later than the Christian era, the Central American Indians invented a way to calculate time: numbering days (cuenta larga, meaning "long count" ). This system is independent of the aforementioned calendar cycles, counting on the next day starting from an ancient day more or less mystical. This very accurate day system has been a great help to modern researchers in the early twentieth century when people established the relationship between it and our calendar. The original purpose of this date recording system is to serve the Mayans in codifying important historical dates related to the gods, or their leaders.

Other calendar cycles.

The ancient Maya also used other calendar cycles for historical, divination or speculation purposes. For example, from the pictogram G1-G9, people still know the existence of a 9-day (or night) calendar cycle, for 9 gods. Moreover, a combination of short cycles of 7, 9 and 13 days, each cycle for a different type of spirit, constitutes an 819-day cycle for divination purposes.

Astronomy

Not only at observing the stars and predicting the motion of celestial bodies, Maya astronomers used a very sophisticated digital and spreadsheet system, combined with similar letters to make Complex operations with millions numbers.

First, their efforts are directed toward the Sun and the Moon. They use years of different lengths in nature. Usually, the 365-day long standard is considered a basis, but it can also be dated 364 days or 365 1/7 days, similar to the Julilan calendar (Jules César calendar)

Astronomy (Photo: art3w)

The moon is always present in rocky calendars. This calendar usually starts with one day based on the phase of the Moon and the location of that day in a calendar of the 6-month Moon.

Maya astronomers have also calculated Venus's orbit and the 584-day results are surprisingly close to those of modern astronomers. But they have not stopped here, the Maya handbook of Dresden has corrections, which allow for very small deviations from those values, in order to detect these deviations that require a long observation time. tens, even hundreds of years. The researchers also said that the Mayans succeeded in calculating the movements of many other planets such as Mars or Jupiter, but this has not been proven.

Enter pure mathematics

For the Maya, the basic reason for them to build calendars, astronomical calculations is religion, divination and future prediction. Their calendar specialists have taken the time to establish correlations between different calendar cycles, using the smallest common multiples and other methods to predict the future, or connect the present with the facts important in the past. In this way they can also discover a little about the fate of their master's relatives - whether it is the leader or other individual.

The actual calculations have solved the combined algorithms and theories have the probability. Many calculations have been pushed far into the past and future to the point that it is impressive that clergy who are in charge of the calendar want to first satisfy their own need for understanding, and explore the limits of his mathematical ability. That allowed us to say that the Mayans were like before and after them, the Babylone, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Indians all had an excellent pure mathematical intuition.

Berthold Riese of Germany, an expert on American Indian cultures. He published Maya Kalender und Astronomic, a collective work edited by Ulrich Kohler (1988).