March 02, 2017 Thursday
Bedtime Story
The Egyptians Went Retrograde With Their Hieroglyphics
The other great civilization, the Egyptians completely missed out
on this great mathematical discovery of Mesopotamians.
Instead they adopted a more language based kind of arithmetic with
a unique symbol for one, ten, hundred, and so on.
This kind of numbering is known as numeration by Hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyph is the name given to the formal writing system of the
ancient Egypt that used logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements.
A logogram is a character in a written language the represents a
word or a phrase.
Among today’s languages, Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are
logograms.
So the Egyptians took a great leap back as far as mathematical
notation was concerned.
They resorted to symbols which though quiet beautiful and artistic
wasn’t really great mathematics.
They had a heel-bone for ten, a coil of rope for hundred, a lotus
flower icon for thousand and a bird for hundred thousand.
If you recall, till now, neither the Sumerians, nor the
Babylonians, nor the Egyptians had special figures for the first ten natural
numbers.
All these three great civilizations would represent 5 with five
strokes or five repetitions of whatever they designated as one.
You see mon ami, even such simplest of things that we take for
granted took thousands of years to evolve.
The only thing that got us here to this point, and I really mean
the only thing besides the perfect goldilocks conditions, was the time.
Imagination fails the brains of the upright apes when it comes to
time spans that spread across geological eras.
It seems that it was the Greeks who came close to this “simple” idea
but not absolutely close.
They began to represent numbers with their alphabets thus
representing 1, 2, 3 with alpha, beta, gamma and so on.
It is always better to illustrate these things, trivial as it may
seem, these were steps in the right direction.
alpha α 1
beta β 2
gamma γ 3
delta δ 4
epsilon ε 5
digamma (archaic) ς 6
zeta ζ 7
eta η 8
theta θ 9
iota ι 10
kappa κ 20
lambda λ 30
mu μ 40
nu ν 50
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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