Maya society was rigidly divided between nobles, commoners, serfs, and slaves. Nobles served as rulers, government officials, tribute collectors, military leaders, high priests, local administrators, cacao plantation managers, and trade expedition leaders. …

The Maya civilization consisted of a large number of city-states. Each city-state had its own independent government. A city-state was made up of a major city and the surrounding areas which sometimes included some smaller settlements and cities.

The Emperor or Huey Tlatoani The Aztec government was similar to a monarchy where an Emperor or King was the primary ruler. They called their ruler the Huey Tlatoani. The Huey Tlatoani was the ultimate power in the land. They felt that he was appointed by the gods and had the divine right to rule.

The ancient Mayan social hierarchy structure may be briefly stated as follows. The top of the ladder was constituted by priests and kings along with royal families who lived in the palaces. Then were the wealthy nobles placed on the second level. Commoners and officers were at the next level in the hierarchy.

The Mayan religion was Polytheist, and they worshiped more than 165 Gods. The Gods were human-like. The Gods were born, grew up and died.

Mayan men worked as farmers, hunters, craftsmen, artists, builders, architects and on a number of other jobs. The higher-level jobs in Mayan Society, such as military chiefs and civil officials, were occupied by the Mayan nobility.

The ancient Maya never used coins as money. Instead, like many early civilizations, they were thought to mostly barter, trading items such as tobacco, maize, and clothing.

Why not try your hand at pronouncing these Yucatec Maya phrases and add a bit of Maya to your multilingual phrasebook….Yucatec Maya Phrases.

Do The Maya Still Exist? Descendants of the Maya still live in Central America in modern-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico. The majority of them live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal.

The Maya writing system is considered by archaeologists to be the most sophisticated system ever developed in Mesoamerica. The Maya wrote using 800 individual signs or glyphs, paired in columns that read together from left to right and top to bottom.

The Maya used an advanced form of writing called hieroglyphics. Only the wealthy Maya became priests and learned to read and write. They wrote on long sheets of paper made from bark or leather. These sheets were folded up like an accordion to make books.

Diego de Landa

The Maya used the vigesimal system for their calculations – a system based on 20 rather than 10. This means that instead of the 1, 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 of our mathematical system, the Maya used 1, 20, 400, 8,000 and 160,000. The system could thus be extended infinitely.

The ancient Maya used mathematics to support many activities in their daily lives, from market transactions to predicting eclipses and making sophisticated calendar calculations. Maya mathematics is vigesimal, which means that instead of counting by tens, Maya math counts by twenties.

The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth.

Here are some of the most famous women mathematicians.

• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
• Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891)
• Emmy Noether (1882-1935)
• Dorothy Vaughan (1910-2008)
• Katherine Johnson (born 1918)
• Julia Robinson (1919-1985)
• Mary Jackson (1921-2005)
• Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)

The 10 best mathematicians

• Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), mathematician, astrologer and physician.
• Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).
• Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).
• Georg Ferdinand Cantor (1845-1918), German mathematician.
• Paul Erdos (1913-96).
• John Horton Conway.
• Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman.
• Terry Tao. Photograph: Reed Hutchinson/UCLA.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) referred to mathematics as “the Queen of the Sciences”. Benjamin Peirce (1809-1880) called mathematics “the science that draws necessary conclusions”. David Hilbert said of mathematics: “We are not speaking here of arbitrariness in any sense.

Noam David Elkies (born August 25, 1966) is an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At the age of 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard….

TIL “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski was a math genius who was admitted into Harvard at the age of 16.

1. Karl Witte – 13. Born in 1800, Karl Witte was the son of an educational author who is said to have put his hypotheses to work on his son.
2. Kim Ung-Yong – 15.
3. Balamurali Ambati – 17.
4. Ruth Lawrence – 17.
5. Norbert Wiener – 17.
6. Sho Yano – 18.
7. Juliet Beni – 19.
8. Charles Homer Haskins – 19.

The real answer is the best mathematicians are both born and made, while most mathematicians are made.