February 28, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Babylonians Had Set Our Time
So in essence, the problem of writing higher numbers boiled down
to the issue of either reusing or repeating the digits.
This may seem extremely trivial now mon ami, but believe me, it
took us apes seriously long time to arrive at the notation that we use
currently.
As the history will go on to show us, even after having discovered
this novel form of notation, it was lost yet again for 3000 years before it was
rediscovered.
It seems the Babylonians (people of Mesopotamia in around 2000 BC
or so) were the first to have arrived at the idea of positional notation of
numbers.
They worked on a type of writing that goes by the name of Cuneiform
script which they had inherited from the Sumerians (people in the region of
Mesopotamia, modern Iraq in the period of 3000 B.C.)
The Cuneiform script in turn developed from pictographic
pro-writing of the 4000 B.C. and 5000 B.C.
How do we know this?
Well, some men love to dig.
They go by the fancy name of archaeologists.
And these guys in 1850s dug up some half a million (500,000) baked
and preserved clay tablets of which 400 of them had mathematics in them.
These belonged to the Babylonians of Mesopotamia.
400 tablets out of 500,000 containing mathematics really does seem
to be small fraction, does it not?
Yet this fraction is slightly higher than the content of
mathematical websites to all the websites across the world today.
Mesopotamians had a symbol for each power of ten and each digit
was separated by a space.
Instead of base 10, they used the sexagesimal system (base 60)
that we still use today to measure time, angles and the geographic coordinates.
60 is a superiorly highly composite number that has twelve
factors, namely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 60.
Of these 2, 3, and 5 are prime numbers.
Having so many factors allows 60 to be divided in so many ways
that makes it a great choice for becoming a tool of time keeper.
As history as shown, 60 turned out to be the perfect watch maker.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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