Greek “S”

In ancient Greece, there lived a mathematician named Pythagoras who was obsessed with finding patterns in numbers. One day, while taking a walk in the woods, he stumbled upon a group of young children playing a game of hopscotch.

Curious, Pythagoras observed the game for a while and noticed that they were marking the boundaries of each square with a strange symbol that resembled an ‘S’. Intrigued, he approached the children and asked them what the symbol meant.

One of the children, a bright young girl named Athena, explained that the symbol was called ‘sigma‘ and it was a letter from the Greek alphabet that meant ‘sum‘. She went on to explain that the symbol was used to indicate the sum of numbers in a sequence.

Fascinated by this discovery, Pythagoras started studying and experimenting with sigma. He even invented his own mathematical formula using sigma to calculate the sum of all the numbers in a sequence.

From then on, sigma became an integral part of Greek mathematics and was used in various mathematical disciplines such as algebra, geometry, and calculus. And to this day, sigma remains a symbol of the brilliant minds of ancient Greece and their contributions to the world of mathematics.