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The Kyoto Prefecture Research Center for Archaeological Properties has announced the discovery of a strip of wood from the eighth century with 35 individual multiplications written on it.The wood strip, unearthed at the Tsuruo archeological site in the city of Kyotango, Kyoto Prefecture, western Japan, is 219 millimeters long, 49 millimeters wide and 6 millimeters thick.As the site had a public office at the time, the research center believes that civil servants who worked there used the strip of wood to speed up tax collection work.The front of the strip shows the eight and nine times tables written in ink,...

Of all the numerals, "0" -- alone in green on the roulette wheel -- is most significant. Unique in representing absolute nothingness, its role as a placeholder gives our number system its power. It enables the numerals to cycle, acquiring different meanings in different locations (compare 3,000,000 and 30). With the exception of the Mayan system, whose zero glyph never left the Americas, ours is the only one known to have a numeral for zero. Babylonians had a mark for nothingness, say some accounts, but treated it primarily as punctuation. Romans and Egyptians had no such numeral either... Found on...

Neither Goldman Sachs Group Inc nor its employees will face U.S. criminal charges related to trades they made during the financial crisis that were highlighted in a 2011 U.S. Senate report, the Justice Department said on Thursday. The unusual announcement not to prosecute criminally came in an unsigned statement attributed to the department. Few expected the bank to face criminal charges, but in April 2011, U.S. Senator Carl Levin asked for a criminal investigation

What inspired you to write The Abacus and the Cross?I was introduced to The Scientist Pope through an act of grace. Writing my previous book, The Far Traveler, about an adventurous Viking woman, I found myself making an imaginary pilgrimage to Rome just after the year 1000. Wondering which pope (if any) Gudrid the Far-Traveler had met, I discovered Gerbert of Aurillac, Pope Sylvester II. I was astonished. Nothing in my many years of reading about the Middle Ages had led me to suspect that the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day.  Nor...

Abacus is a Latin word meaning sand tray. The word originates with the Arabic "abq", which means dust or fine sand. In Greek this would become abax or abakon which means table or tablet... Probably, the first device was the counting board. This appeared at various times in several places around the world. The earliest counting boards consisted of a tray made of sun dried clay or wood. A thin layer of sand would be spread evenly on the surface, and symbols would be drawn in the sand with a stick or ones finger. To start anew, one would simply...

Warren Buffett offered a vigorous defense of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Saturday, saying the embattled firm hadn't engaged in improper activity and shouldn't be blamed for the losses of its clients. Goldman has been reeling from Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that the bank had engaged in fraudulent activities in relation to a mortgage deal called Abacus 2007-AC1. Goldman says it did nothing wrong. The billionaire investor said he fully supported Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Asked if he could choose a successor for Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Buffett said: "If Lloyd had a twin brother I'd go for him." Buffett also...

Any time Erin Burnett tells a guest "You will not be back, you have to be more polite than that" you know the "guest" is telling the truth, the one commodity rarely if ever discussed on General Electric's circus station. Enter (or rather, exit) R&R Consulting's Sylvain Raynes, a structured finance expert, who at 3:10 into the clip takes on what he calls the "public relations officers" for Goldman, and asks "is it all right if I am a little critical?" Apparently the answer is no. First, Sylvain completely destroys Cramer's false "breaking news" about Goldman being long Abacus... And...

When I heard Barack Hussein Obama mention last night that the government invented computers, I immediately thought it was invented by kids (not Al Gore) working in a garage. Guess I was wrong as today I discovered the following on another blog: Was this a McCain moment by obama? Quick takeaway from the 2nd presidential debate - Obama claimed specifically that U.S. government invented the computer, and Obama was very wrong. The computer was developed over a long period of time, and by most historical accounts trace back to Europe with British and German inventors in the late 19th and...