1-4-1.
Imagine that you’d been a shepherd, living before invention of numerals. You
probably would've wanted to know if you’d lost some sheep, maybe a wolf had
preyed on them. So you'd need an equivalent amount which could be remained
unchanged.
Your
fingers were probably the first things you could have found. Making a one to
one correspondence between your fingers and the number of the sheep enabled you to
record the quantity. However, you know that it wouldn't be applicable if the
quantity exceeded ten or twenty (if you used your foot fingers too);
moreover, there are unexpected and unfortunate accidents in which somebody might
lose one or some of their fingers.
So,
one of the first things that you could find around abundantly was stone. You could
gather pebbles to record the quantity. So it’s not unexpected that the word
calculation stemmed the Greek word “calculus” (plural: calculi) which means “pebble”.
However using pebbles has two main disadvantages:
1. they take up space: it’d be difficult to keep them, especially to carry them around if you wanted to trade your sheep
2. one or some of them might be lost (pranksters might have been in that era too)
1. they take up space: it’d be difficult to keep them, especially to carry them around if you wanted to trade your sheep
2. one or some of them might be lost (pranksters might have been in that era too)
If
you'd been one of the geniuses of that epoch, you would've found out that you could have carved a notch into a stone or wood. It doesn't take that much space and it’s rather
permanent. Of course you could lose the stone or wood but the recorded quantity
can be hardly changed.
