Blackadder: Right Baldrick, let’s try again shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, what do I have?
Blackadder episode, “Head”
Baldrick: Some beans.
Blackadder: Yes… and no. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So how many are there?
Baldrick: Three.
Blackadder: What?
Baldrick: …and that one.
Blackadder: Three and that one. Let’s try again shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
Baldrick: A very small casserole.

Yes, dear readers, there will be math today. I know you can do it. I know you can run intellectual circles around Baldrick.
The definitive work on this topic is The History of Mathematics by Merzbach and Boyer, which is already in a Third Edition, even though not much has changed for the Egyptians and Sumerians, who used what we’d consider basic counting systems to construct giant pyramids. Mainly, Merzbach and Boyer have added a “Logic and Computing” and “Recent Trends” chapters at the end. Remember when Computer Science was about logic and not Belarussians creating algorithms to stuff your social media full of outrage porn? How quaint!
Anyway, I digress. Today, I want to describe how different cultures approached numbers–not specifically whether they were smart enough to figure out Fermat’s theorem or Poincare’s theory–but how we as humans figured out what Baldrick apparently couldn’t. Thinking about math is hard, but we’ll also see that there are harder and easier ways to do it.
Continue reading “N is for Numbers”