March 01, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
The Mesopotamians Almost Got the Numbering Right
The numerical symbols used by the Babylonians look like feet
impressions of some tiny bird.
I shall try to show how they wrote by sending you a picture of one
of their mathematical tablets.
Overall, the Mesopotamians came extremely close to present
notation of writing numbers.
Early Mesopotamians had a symbol for each power of ten, but later
they began to use coefficient of that number.
Yet, this beautiful idea got lost for nearly 3000 years.
It is the Sumerians and the Mesopotamians that were the earliest
cradle of civilization since they invented nearly everything that would go on
to give rise to “modernity”.
Besides mathematics itself, they were the originators of writing,
the wheel, the arch, the plow, the irrigation and the agriculture.
Yet, to me these inventions do not count very significant.
I consider two crucial factors by which a civilization’s greatness
can be or rather should be ranked:
One is the system of public hygiene that includes clean drinkable
water, proper sewage system, state of public toilets and public baths.
Second is capacity to indulge in abstract mathematics and pure
science and to be able to support its intellectual geniuses who are few and
generally both very unprofitable in the immediate sense and economically very
vulnerable.
A civilization can only be considered to be adequately developed
if it can fulfill both these criteria.
Just to be clear, when I use the word Mesopotamians, it implies
both the Sumerians and the Babylonians.
Sumerians were the early Mesopotamians and the Babylonians came in
later.
These Mesopotamians had another feather in their pocket.
They had invented a revolutionary concept of a circle for zero at
a later stage in around 300 B.C.
Yet there was a catch.
Unlike the zero of the Hindus (during the Gupta period in 500
A.D.), the zero of Babylonians did not have its own right; it was never used
alone and never at the end of a digit or a number.
It was used only along with other digits as a place holder.
It was only much later that the Hindus really exploited zero to
its fullest by using it as a digit in the decimal place-value notation system.
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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