essay on abacus 3000BC
Answers
The abacus (plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use in Europe, China and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system.[1] The exact origin of the abacus is still unknown. Today, abacuses are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal.
Abacuses come in different designs. Some designs, like the bead frame consisting of beads divided into tens, are used mainly to teach arithmetic, although they remain popular in the post-Soviet states as a tool. Other designs, such as the Japanese soroban, have been used for practical calculations even involving several digits. For any particular abacus design, there are usually numerous different methods to perform a certain type of calculation, which may include basic operations like addition and multiplication, or even more complex ones, such as calculating square roots. Some of these methods may work with non-natural numbers (numbers such as 1.5 and 3⁄4).
Although today many use calculators and computers instead of abacuses to calculate, abacuses still remain in common use in some countries. Merchants, traders and clerks in some parts of Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Africa use abacuses, and they are still used to teach arithmetic to children.[1] Some people who are unable to use a calculator because of visual impairment may use an abacus.
Answer:
Explanation:
Why does the abacus exist?
It is difficult to imagine counting without numbers, but there was a time when written numbers did not exist. The earliest counting device was the human hand and its fingers, capable of counting up to 10 things; toes were also used to count in tropical cultures. Then, as even larger quantities (greater than ten fingers and toes could represent) were counted, various natural items like pebbles, sea shells and twigs were used to help keep count.
Merchants who traded goods needed a way to keep count (inventory) of the goods they bought and sold. Various portable counting devices were invented to keep tallies. The abacus is one of many counting devices invented to help count large numbers. When the Hindu-Arabic number system came into use, abaci were adapted to use place-value counting.
Abaci evolved into electro-mechanical calculators, pocket slide-rules, electronic calculators and now abstract representations of calculators or simulations on smartphones.
What is the difference between a counting board and an abacus?
It is important to distinguish the early abacuses (or abaci) known as counting boards from the modern abaci. The counting board is a piece of wood, stone or metal with carved grooves or painted lines between which beads, pebbles or metal discs were moved. The abacus is a device, usually of wood (romans made them out of metal and they are made of plastic in modern times), having a frame that holds rods with freely-sliding beads mounted on them.
Both the abacus and the counting board are mechanical aids used for counting; they are not calculators in the sense we use the word today. The person operating the abacus performs calculations in their head and uses the abacus as a physical aid to keep track of the sums, the carrys, etc.
What did the first counting board look like?
The earliest counting boards are forever lost because they were constructed of perishable materials like wood.
Educated guesses can be made about the construction of counting boards based on early writings of Plutarch and others.
Used in outdoor markets of those times, the simplest counting board involved drawing lines in the sand with ones fingers or with a stylus, and placing pebbles between those lines as place-holders representing numbers (the spaces between the lines would represent the units 10s, 100s, etc.); two pebbles inthe 10s column would indicate 20. Affluent merchants could afford small wooden tables having raised borders that were filled with sand (usually coloured blue or green). A benefit of these counting boards on tables, was that they could be moved without disturbing the calculation— the table could be picked up and carried indoors.
With the need for portable devices, wooden boards with grooves carved into the surface were then created and wooden markers (small discs) were used as place-holders. The wooden boards then gave way to even more more durable materials like marble and metal (bronze) used with stone or metal markers.