Masters of Math, From Old Babylon

NYT ^ | November 26, 2010 | EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

[donmeaker]

Romans actually multipled by doubling one number, and halving the other, (what we could call a binary register shift) then selecting certain of the doubled numbers based on whether they did of didn’t evenly divide by 2.

Calculators now use the same algorithm because of the ease of the binary phase shift.

Not too shabby Romans!

[scrabblehack]

Fred’s table makes it appear to be a small amount compared to the cost of moving the earth. As I say it doesn’t seem to add up.

[wildbill]

Liberal arts majors in Babylon didn’t have to screw with that New Math stuff.

They hired guys with with quill pen protectors in their djellabas to build canals and towers and worry about that gin and ninda stuff.

Meanwhile they wrote everlasting stories about Gilgamesh and Einkaidu (an adventure serial with a hero and sidekick) and the relationship of Gods and Man.

[worst-case scenario]

Great article, thanks. But it’s from the New York Times - can it be trusted?

[Grizzled Bear]

If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin...

Wait a minute! After nine gin, I'm kicked back with the space monkeys discussing astrophysics!

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Aaboe suggests that Babylonian numbers were quite well suited for arithmetic because 60 is a highly composite number. Multiplication was reduced to successive multiplication by the prime factors of the multiplier and Babylonian scribes were well versed in multiplication tables. The place were base 60 shone was in division, which is a much harder problem than multiplication. Since 60 has so many multipliers, many division problems reduced to multiplication and division by sixty. By analogy, in base 10, division by 5 reduces to multiplication by 2 followed, trivially, by division by 10. One of the mathematical tablets found from Babylonia was a four Sexagesimal place table of reciprocals of 7, for all integers from 1 to 59. This would be equivalent to a six decimal place table of reciprocals of 7 for integers 1-9 in base 10. (142857, 285712, 428571, 57142, 714285, 1000000, 1142857 1285712... division of result by a 10^6 implied.) Clearly such tables were NOT ephemera, as implied by the article, but were standard reference works like tables of trigonometric functions and logarithms were up to around 1980.

Ptolemy also recommends and teaches Babylonia arithmetic in the Almagest because of its superiority for computation.

[tarheelswamprat]

Thanks for the information.

[Beowulf9]

“Not too many nindas gonna be dug after 9 gin.”

LOL.

[eyedigress]

Damn, I used the same calculations for my ditch but came up with a ditch much deeper and longer. (Did I mention free beer after the dig...)

[colorado tanker]

[SunkenCiv]

LOLOL!