Here's a breakdown:
* Ancient Civilizations: Early civilizations like the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Chinese all had systems for representing numbers and performing basic arithmetic, including addition.
* Formalization: While the concept of addition was understood intuitively, it wasn't formally defined until the Greeks, who developed a more systematic approach to mathematics.
* Modern Notation: The symbols we use today for addition (+) and the equal sign (=) are attributed to Renaissance mathematicians like Robert Recorde and William Oughtred.
So, while no one single person "discovered" addition, the development of this fundamental concept was a collaborative effort across many cultures and centuries.