The Twentieth Century

In the 20th century, mathematics has become much more diversified. Each specialist subject is being studied in far greater depth and advanced work in some fields may be unintelligible to researchers in other fields.

Mathematicians working in universities have had the economic freedom to pursue the subject for its own sake. Nevertheless, new branches of mathematics have been developed which are of great practical importance and which have basic ideas simple enough to be taught in secondary schools. Probably the most important of these is the mathematical theory of statistics in which much pioneering work was done by Karl Pearson.

Karl Pearson

Another new development is operations research, which is concerned with finding optimum courses of action in practical situations, particularly in economics and management.

As in the late medieval period, commerce began to emerge again as a major impetus for the development of mathematics. Higher mathematics has a powerful tool in the high-speed electronic computer, which can create and manipulate mathematical `modelsī of various systems in science, technology, and commerce.