Decimal arithmetic, was Re: Python GUI app to impress the boss?

Christian Tismer tismer at tismer.com
Thu Oct 3 22:31:14 EDT 2002


Greg Ewing wrote:
> Christian Tismer wrote:
> 
>> And see how simple they built their positional
>> system, using just two symbols:
>> http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_numerals.html 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Although I suspect that scribes would quickly
> have learned to recognise each "cluster" of
> marks, drawn in a recognisable pattern,
> as a single symbol, in which case there
> were really 14 symbols (5 + 9).

Right. Remarkably they did *lack a zero* !!!

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