December 19, 2022 08:10PM
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Admin
Registered: 17 years ago
Posts: 3,737
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molder Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> From The Roots of Ancient India, The Archaeology
> of Early Indian
> Civilisation, second edition, revised by Walter
> Fairservis Jr (1975):
> … linear measurement was apparently well
> standardised. Mackay by good
> fortune found a piece of shell marked in regular
> fashion and quite clearly
> intended as a rule. Nine divisions remain, and
> from circular markings at
> two places five units apart it would appear that a
> decimal system was in
> vogue. Each division is approx 0.264 inches wide,
> or a five-unit total of
> 1.32 inches. Thus a foot in the decimal system
> would be 13.2 inches,
> 14
I don't think anyone in the world (including me) disputes that. However, this does not show that anyone in the ancient world knew or used the decimal system.
It was one of the great revolutions of the world, simplifying the way we write numbers and making them a very manageable system so that calculating could be done easily. Calculating something like the trajectory of a missile or the gradient of a road or compound interest would have been fraught with errors and frustration if you tried to do it in the systems they used before the decimal was discovered.
To figure out the circumference of a circle with a radius of six, they would have had to write this: (3+1/8 + 1/61 + 1/5088 + 1/60618750)*(3*3) instead of (3.14159*(3*3)) So their multiplication involving that last number starts by writing the symbol for 'million' 60 times, then the symbol for 100,000 6 times and the symbol for 10,000 1 time and the symbol for 1,000 8 times (etc) and that whole formula involves writing down almost 100 symbols and doing calculations on each of the 7 groups, as opposed to what we do today.
Heck, it'd take awhile to write the number itself and the chances for mistakes are very high. With decimals, you can do the whole number AND the multiplications in less than a minute.
If they'd had decimals, the number-happy Babylonians would have pranced down to Cairo and nicked the concept in a heartbeat!
-- Byrd
Moderator, Hall of Ma'at
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