Big Ideas That Changed the World No. 2: Machines That Think!
SIGH Numbers I know a thing or two about them My writings helped popularize the zero through nine counting system that's used around the world Without me you might still be stuck doing math with the Ls and Xs of Roman numerals Ugh That would be awful I'm mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al Khwārizmi Some people have twisted my name into Algoritmi but I think you can do better Al Khwārizmi Al kraw iz mee That's it I knew you could do it So you ask did you invent the numbers we use today No I learned about zero through nine from the Hindus of ancient India But my writings spread their use and since I lived in the Arab world people mistakenly called them Arabic numerals 2
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Arabic numerals are easier to use than Roman numerals but can still be difficult when there are a lot of them Just think about those homework assignments in which you have to add a giant column of numbers It's hard and boring Well you aren't the first to feel that way Through the years people have wrestled with big numbers Over time there have been lots of ideas to make computing adding subtracting multiplying and dividing less of a chore But it wasn't until the invention of the computer that working with numbers became a snap And that big idea led to the bigger idea of using computers to do things beyond computing things the people of my time couldn't have even dreamed And you could say it all started with stones in the sand 3
A long time ago and I don't mean last month or last year but about three thousand years ago people had the idea to use pebbles and stones to calculate Arranged in columns in the sand the pebbles in each column were given a certain value one ten or one hundred for example The user kept track of the pebbles in each of the columns After ten pebbles were counted in the ones column a pebble would be added to the tens column When there were ten pebbles in the tens column a pebble would be placed in the hundreds column By moving pebbles into and out of the columns the user could do arithmetic a lot easier than doing it in their head 100 10 2 100 20 TOTAL 124 4
Eventually people stopped counting in the sand and placed the stones on wooden boards In time the stones were replaced with metal counters or beads and the board was reduced to just a frame called a counting board We know it as the abacus The ancient Greeks and Romans used the abacus as did the Medieval Europeans It's still widely used in Asia 5
