History of chemistry
An important breakthrough in making sense of the list of known chemical elements (as well as in understanding the internal structure of atoms) was Dmitri Mendeleev's development of the first modern periodic table, or the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, felt that there was some type of order to the elements and he spent more than thirteen years of his life collecting data and assembling the concept, initially with the idea of resolving some of the disorder in the field for his students. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. Mendeleev's law allowed him to build up a systematic periodic table of all the 66 elements then known based on atomic mass, which he published in "Principles of Chemistry" in 1869. His first Periodic Table was compiled on the basis of arranging the elements in ascending order of atomic weight and grouping them by similarity of properties.
Multiplication table
The oldest known multiplication tables were used by the Babylonians about 4000 years ago. However, they used a base of 60. The oldest known tables using a base of 10 are the Chinese decimal multiplication table on bamboo strips dating to about 305 BC, during China's Warring States period.
The multiplication table is sometimes attributed to the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (570–495 BC). It is also called the Table of Pythagoras in many languages (for example French, Italian and Russian), sometimes in English. The Greco-Roman mathematician Nichomachus (60–120 AD), a follower of Neopythagoreanism, included a multiplication table in his "Introduction to Arithmetic", whereas the oldest surviving Greek multiplication table is on a wax tablet dated to the 1st century AD and currently housed in the British Museum.