The Universal Book of Mathematics
From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes
Chapter One
A
abacus
A counting frame that started out, several thousand years
ago, as rows of pebbles in the desert sands of the Middle
East. The word appears to come from the Hebrew âbâq
(dust) or the Phoenician abak (sand) via the Greek abax,
which refers to a small tray covered with sand to hold the
pebbles steady. The familiar frame-supporting rods or
wires, threaded with smoothly running beads, gradually
emerged in a variety of places and mathematical forms.
In Europe, there was a strange state of affairs for more
than 1,500 years. The Greeks and the Romans, and then
the medieval Europeans, calculated on devices with a
place-value system in which zero was represented by an
empty line or wire. Yet the written notations didn't have
a symbol for zero until it was introduced in Europe in
1202 by Fibonacci, via the Arabs and the Hindus.
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