[Artemisia] Harvest War Classes

[Sarah Natividad]

I do actually have a bit of knowledge how to work a counting board.  They
are easy to make and I bet they'd make a fun kids' class.  As a kid I always
wondered how people did arithmetic with Roman numerals; it hadn't occurred
to me that they just didn't, so maybe other kids would be curious too.

An abacus, like the kind we're used to seeing with beads on wires, I think
is Asian not European.  The Europeans used the counting board, like the
Greeks before them, because they too lacked a decent number system and were
using letters for numbers.  Arithmetic algorithms with the Hindu-Arabic
numerals were introduced during the medieval period, but they were different
than they are today.   I remember the famous woodcut that shows Dame
Arithmetic sponsoring a competition between Boethius (representing the
algorists and using Hindu-Arabic numerals) and Pythagoras (representing the
old ways and using a counting board).  The point of it was to show Boethius
kicking Pythagoras' trash with his newfangled symbols.  That's about all I
know off the top of my head.  I have a couple of resource books on the
subject, but not a whole lot else.

I have more knowledge of Egyptian arithmetic, just because I was researching
it a few years ago for a project that I've had to move to the way-back
burner.  But just today I spent my amusement time by reading about medieval
number signs (hand signs, kind of like sign language), and I can play a game
called "Morra" that's a number dueling game for two players, kind of like a
more intellectual rock-paper-scissors, that dates back to that era (although
not in Europe, in Muslim lands IIRC).  But I'm nowhere near an expert.  I
couldn't, for example, produce those number signs off the top of my head,
except for a couple that were kinda memorable for being involved in a
historically documented dirty joke.  I'd have to do a lot of studying to get
to that point.

-- 
Sarah Natividad
http://curiousworkmanship.etsy.com
http://organicbabyfarm.blogspot.com