Most people who love to play number games like the highly successful Sudoku may or may or know that the numbers they’re playing with have a historical influence on our lives. We might have an inkling about how important these numbers are to our way of life without being cognizant of just how far numerals go in the development of humankind. So as you sit filling in those numbers, you might want to think about the fact they you’re not just playing, you’re touching a part of history as well.

It was way back in the seventeenth century that modern science as we know it today got started and mathematics was a huge part of that. These pioneering practitioners of this new science were aware they were producing a new kind of knowledge, although they more than likely didn’t see it ending up with the Sudoku game, and so they started to name their publications accordingly as far back as 1620. Even a name that we all know to this day, Galileo, scribbled down what he discovered using numbers in his book titled Two New Sciences.

The ancients before these scientists knew a few mathematical laws, but those who created the new laws of the seventeenth century not only found that their laws could be expressed in numbers but that these numbers could be expressed in squares and cubes as well. One of the most amazing discoveries that was made during this time was the fact that the blood circulated through the body and that a mathematical formula could be applied to this previously mysterious occurrence.

One of the more interesting things about this historical time was the other venues that inventors and scientists had for all their newfound math. For example, one enterprising Italian scientist by the name of Sanctorius developed a weighing chair that was the predecessor the modern scale. He had a platform constructed that was supported by slings in such a way that he was able to weigh his own body weight and that was a first for the time. He then made regular measurements of his weight during the course of the whole day and he was able to see how the food and liquid he ingested changed his weight over the course of a day.