I'm reading: Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times by Kline. My question is about this pasasge:
Beyond its achievements in subject matter, the nineteenth century reintroduced rigorous proof. No matter what individual mathematicians may have thought about the soundness of their results, the fact is that from about 200 B.C. to about 1870 almost all of mathematics rested on an empirical and pragmatic basis. The concept of deductive proof from explicit axioms had been lost sight of. It is one of the astonishing revelations of the history of mathematics that this ideal of the subject was, in effect, ignored during the two thousand years in which its content expanded so extensively.
I wasn't aware of this at all. To me mathematics is about rigour, so to hear that this rigour is relatively new to mathematics suprised me. Mathematics that is based on emperical and pragmatic basis seems more like applied mathematics to me, not as pure mathematics.
So in that sense, can I see the mathematics from 200 B.C. to 1870 as mainly applied mathematics ? And the pure mathematics as I know it, is this mainly created in the last $\pm$150 years ?