Classical Studies 2700A/B Lecture 6: Classics 2700B Lecture 6
27 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Unlike the babylonians, who used a combination of decimal and sexagesimal (sixties) numbers, all the peoples of the bronze age and later in the aegean area and in italy used decimal systems for numerical calculations. How the romans wrote large numbers. (fractions, however, were cumbersome-- and messy. ) Babylonians worked in sixties: very important today (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour) Babyonians had a combination of sixties and ones. Greeks had another system using capital letters: delta causes confusion in manuscripts (is it 4 or 10?, cumbersome but not a bad system, works reasonably well. System was cumbersome and prevented multiplication and division calculations involving large numbers or complex fractions: archimedes is greatest scientist in ancient world (mathematician) Could do calculus geometrically, rather than mathematically. Wanted to play with very large numbers. Wanted to know how many grains of sand there were in the universe (wanted to calculate this out)
