Keith Devlin
speaker
76 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Apr 2012
Keith Devlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Either they counted on their fingers...
They actually had a very sophisticated finger system.
The other way they used to calculate was with a board on which lines were ruled, on which you move pebbles around.
Then you record the answers in Roman numerals.
So, first of all, that meant you had an expert to do it for.
You couldn't do your own calculations.
You had to have someone who'd spent many years becoming efficient at using one of these two physical calculating methods.
Another drawback was there's no audit trail.
If you carry out a long calculation and then one of the two parties disputes the answer,
You can't just go back over the working like we would today.
The working's disappeared.
You have to carry out the whole calculation again.
Because you've done it on your fingers.
It's OK for two people trading goods that are on the backs of camels.
That's fine.
But if you're talking about building a commercial empire, which is what the business people in Pisa were trying to do in the early 13th century, you need an efficient way of doing arithmetic that leaves a record.
It's impossible for us to realise...
At the beginning of the 13th century, nobody in Europe had ever seen that kind of thing before.
The measure of the size of the revolution that followed Leonardo's publication of Liber Abaci is precisely that what had once been impossible became completely taken for granted and regarded as just, well, duh, of course we can do arithmetic.
That's a big revolution.
Showing 41–60 of 76 · page 3 of 4
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