It's My Birthday Too, Yeah. Proportion Control. The Man of Numbers: How Fibonacci Changed the World. By Maria Popova What Medieval mathematics have to do with remix culture, publishing entrepreneurship, and gamification. Imagine a day without numbers — how would you know when to wake up, how to call your mother, how the stock market is doing, or even how old you are?
We live our lives by numbers. They’re so fundamental to our understanding of the world that we’ve grown to take them for granted. And yet it wasn’t always so. Until the 13th century, even simple arithmetic was mostly accessible to European scholars. Merchants kept track of quantifiables using Roman numerals, performing calculations either by an elaborate yet widespread fingers procedure or with a clumsy mechanical abacus. Keith Devlin tells his incredible and important story in The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution, tracing how Fibonacci revolutionized everything from education to economics by making arithmetic available to the masses. Image courtesy of The Library of Florence via NPR Share on Tumblr. Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world. Algorithm. Flow chart of an algorithm (Euclid's algorithm) for calculating the greatest common divisor (g.c.d.) of two numbers a and b in locations named A and B.
The algorithm proceeds by successive subtractions in two loops: IF the test B ≥ A yields "yes" (or true) (more accurately the numberb in location B is greater than or equal to the numbera in location A) THEN, the algorithm specifies B ← B − A (meaning the number b − a replaces the old b). Similarly, IF A > B, THEN A ← A − B. The process terminates when (the contents of) B is 0, yielding the g.c.d. in A. (Algorithm derived from Scott 2009:13; symbols and drawing style from Tausworthe 1977). In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm ( i/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ AL-gə-ri-dhəm) is a step-by-step procedure for calculations.
Informal definition[edit] While there is no generally accepted formal definition of "algorithm," an informal definition could be "a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations Formalization[edit] The History Of Zero. From placeholder to the driver of calculus, zero has crossed the greatest minds and most diverse borders since it was born many centuries ago. Today, zero is perhaps the most pervasive global symbol known. In the story of zero, something can be made out of nothing. Zero, zip, zilch - how often has a question been answered by one of these words? Countless, no doubt. Yet behind this seemingly simple answer conveying nothing lays the story of an idea that took many centuries to develop, many countries to cross, and many minds to comprehend. When anyone thinks of one hundred, two hundred, or seven thousand the image in his or her mind is of a digit followed by a few zeros.
The Sumerians were the first to develop a counting system to keep an account of their stock of goods - cattle, horses, and donkeys, for example. Brahmagupta, around 650 AD, was the first to formalize arithmetic operations using zero. But it would still be a few centuries before zero reached Europe. References: 1. 2. Binary.