Where did Arabic numerals come from? They evolved from a writing system created in India in the 3rd century BC. The first evidence of prehistoric humans using numbers comes from a bone dated from 43,000 years ago. It is the Lebombo bone and it is a baboon femur with 29 notches carved into it. […]
#289 Where did Arabic numerals come from? Read More »
I learned this today. We have 24 hours in a day because of Hipparchus. We have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour because of Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Biruni, and the Babylonians. Before we look at this topic, we have to remember that needing to know the time exactly is a fairly
I learned this today. The mathematical symbols + plus, – minus, x multiply, ÷ divide, and = equal are not as old as we think. Mathematics itself goes back a very long way. The idea of counting began with hunter-gatherer tribes. Presumably, they would have known how to talk about adding and subtracting parts of
#16 Where do the plus, minus, multiplication, and division symbols come from? Read More »
