The Handy Math Answer Book

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EARLY COUNTING AND CALCULATING DEVICES Why were counting devices developed? Early counting devices were developed for a logical ...

grooves or lines, allowing for an even larger number of items to be counted. Over even more time, they grew into what is called ...

Have there been different types of abaciover the centuries? Yes, there have been many different types of abaci over the centurie ...

beads. Each bead on the upper deck has a value of five, while each bead on the lower deck has a value of one (thus, it is called ...

out that historians will never know the real story behind the khipus. When the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire starting in 153 ...

diagonal from each other, or 7 (6 1); and the next number in the separate diagonal, or 8. In other words, 63  6 378. Initiall ...

the “calculating clock,” was able to add and subtract up to six-digit numbers using a mechanism of gears and wheels. But not all ...

rowing Jacquard’s idea, both Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith (see below) would use such cards on their own computing machin ...

some historians to be the “father of computing.” The main reason was his Analytical Engine, which is thought to be the true prec ...

drawings, and in 1888 he computed mul- tiples of pi (π) to prove the acceptability of the design. This is often thought to repre ...

How did the slide rule evolve? In 1620 English astronomer Edmund Gunter (1581–1626) was responsible for construct- ing a scale r ...

The slide rule was not immediately embraced by scientists, mathematicians, or the public. It took until about 1850, when French ...

development of the digital computer. Hollerith’s company would also eventually become well-known, becoming International Busines ...

handling numerical data. Data are entered using a small keypad on the face of the cal- culator; the output (or result) is most c ...

every time another power of two is reached, for example, 2, 4, 8, and so on; in the dec- imal system, another place is added eve ...

of symbolic logic, numerical analysis, electrical engineering, and a mechanical version of human thought processes. His idea bec ...

computer. In 1973, however, a federal judge recognized Atanassoff’s work and voided Sperry Rand’s patent on the ENIAC, saying it ...

computers, the terms microprocessor and CPU are often used interchangeably.) These chips, or integrated circuits, are small, thi ...

considered the largest and most powerful general-purpose computer system. It is usu- ally used to fill the needs of a large agen ...