surprised the abacus wasn't already in existence in OAR

After all, the abacus is one of the oldest technological tools of humankind, developing independently in multiple civilizations thousands of years ago. The Romans even had one that worked with their numeric system. The roman abacus (called the calculi, or 'little stones' even did 1/12th fractions to correspond to their ounces.

Its hard to imagine any agrarian civilization, regardless of their numeric system, to not have deveoloped this simple device to accomodate bookkeeping of food stores and distribution.

Even today, isolated hunter gatherer tribes have no need for a number higher than 5 (most of these primitive languages go straight from 5 to many). But once tribes began switching over to agriculture you see an explosion of numeric systems and in many cases the abacus pops into existence shortly thereafter.

RODMAN012003 wrote:After all, the abacus is one of the oldest technological tools of humankind, developing independently in multiple civilizations thousands of years ago. The Romans even had one that worked with their numeric system. The roman abacus (called the calculi, or 'little stones' even did 1/12th fractions to correspond to their ounces.

Its hard to imagine any agrarian civilization, regardless of their numeric system, to not have deveoloped this simple device to accomodate bookkeeping of food stores and distribution.

Even today, isolated hunter gatherer tribes have no need for a number higher than 5 (most of these primitive languages go straight from 5 to many). But once tribes began switching over to agriculture you see an explosion of numeric systems and in many cases the abacus pops into existence shortly thereafter.

The careful crafting of a society were scientific research is discouraged, mixed with no concept of 0 means you are not going to be in an environment that leads to even the development of an "advanced" adding machine. Tricks like using different colored stones (that corresponded to different roman numerals would probably be commonplace though

The lack of a written zero isn't significant to an abacus. Even the modern abacus's of today don't actually have a zero. What they have is an absence of stones along the center bar, which depicts nothing, which is then mentally translated by us to represent a written zero.

Greek mathematicians devoloped mathematical theorems and equations we still use today, and they didn't have a symbol for zero either.

We translate a Roman X to 10, but to the roman and to us, the symbol represents the same thing.

The zero as a placeholder didn't even reach Europe till the 1100's, much less other far flung ancient civilizations, and yet they all have some version of the abacus. Its not even something the CoGA could proscribe against (stones on a stick, moved by fingerpower).

If I had to guess, no one prior to Merlin who had invented abacus like devices had the political pull or bribe money to get the Inquisition to approve it.

Edit: Also, trade is looked down on my the nobles of more traditional mainland realms. So they might not realize the worth of an abacus when they hear the concept. Contrast Charis which is a TRADING empire, and every Charisian noble worth anything is involved in some form of money making enterprise.

RODMAN012003 wrote:After all, the abacus is one of the oldest technological tools of humankind, developing independently in multiple civilizations thousands of years ago. The Romans even had one that worked with their numeric system. The roman abacus (called the calculi, or 'little stones' even did 1/12th fractions to correspond to their ounces.

Its hard to imagine any agrarian civilization, regardless of their numeric system, to not have deveoloped this simple device to accomodate bookkeeping of food stores and distribution.

Even today, isolated hunter gatherer tribes have no need for a number higher than 5 (most of these primitive languages go straight from 5 to many). But once tribes began switching over to agriculture you see an explosion of numeric systems and in many cases the abacus pops into existence shortly thereafter.

My my my that's an awful lot of... innovation you are preaching. That is the kinda thing that gets a man tossed into an inquisition holding cell. Holy Langhorne decreed the numbering and counting system. Who are you to set your mortal will against his divine plan?


But yea, Langhorne didn't give them an abacus for a reason, whats more they went out of their way to discourage such things like innovation. They introduced a system that works well enough that people can get by, without feeling a need to press the boundaries. If there was NO mathematical system handed down by Langhorne and his flunkies, then something like the Arabic number system that Merlin introduced, and all the math that went with it might have reemerged on its own. Instead Langhorne handed down one that was "good enough" but it precluded anything resembling advanced mathematics.

AAMOF, that's the same misapprehension Langhorne seems to have suffered under. The real impediment to moving past the Classical plateau in geometry [which was already pretty highly developed before Classical Antiquity] and algebra was essentially philosophical, not notational. To whit, you aren't going to move beyond those into analysis and topology until you ditch Aristotle and/or Plato, abandon the idea of 'perfect' shapes, and embrace change as an object of study. Nor can you develop geometry or, especially, algebra fully without tools that were first developed by the topologists and analysts.

With those barriers in place, notation is irrelevant; without them, it doesn't matter.

Direwolf18 wrote:

RODMAN012003 wrote:After all, the abacus is one of the oldest technological tools of humankind, developing independently in multiple civilizations thousands of years ago. The Romans even had one that worked with their numeric system. The roman abacus (called the calculi, or 'little stones' even did 1/12th fractions to correspond to their ounces.

Its hard to imagine any agrarian civilization, regardless of their numeric system, to not have deveoloped this simple device to accomodate bookkeeping of food stores and distribution.

Even today, isolated hunter gatherer tribes have no need for a number higher than 5 (most of these primitive languages go straight from 5 to many). But once tribes began switching over to agriculture you see an explosion of numeric systems and in many cases the abacus pops into existence shortly thereafter.

My my my that's an awful lot of... innovation you are preaching. That is the kinda thing that gets a man tossed into an inquisition holding cell. Holy Langhorne decreed the numbering and counting system. Who are you to set your mortal will against his divine plan?


But yea, Langhorne didn't give them an abacus for a reason, whats more they went out of their way to discourage such things like innovation. They introduced a system that works well enough that people can get by, without feeling a need to press the boundaries. If there was NO mathematical system handed down by Langhorne and his flunkies, then something like the Arabic number system that Merlin introduced, and all the math that went with it might have reemerged on its own. Instead Langhorne handed down one that was "good enough" but it precluded anything resembling advanced mathematics.

While that is true, though it is not just the shackled to the perfect platonics, it was also the nature of people valuing rhetoric above natural philosophy, we do have textev that this was not the case for safehold.
We know that the royal college had managed to shed the philosophical blinkers to an extent, by using the excuse of seeking to understand in greater depths what was given to be known. Just like Coppernicus had no trouble improving the predictions of easter by noting that if you assumed the sun was the center, it was only advocating that this was the physical reality, at a time when the church was feeling repressive, that was the problem: there was no problem, officially in the royal college trying reason out how to get a position fix from astronomic data, which is a spherical problem, in fact it is implied the only novel part was trying to do so on a boat. But we do know that Mahklyn was bottlenecked by his math, there were things the writ and testimonies mentioned that he could almost wrap his head around, but needed the numerals and abacus, and thus the concept of symbolic representation, to fully appreciate.

Louis R wrote:AAMOF, that's the same misapprehension Langhorne seems to have suffered under. The real impediment to moving past the Classical plateau in geometry [which was already pretty highly developed before Classical Antiquity] and algebra was essentially philosophical, not notational. To whit, you aren't going to move beyond those into analysis and topology until you ditch Aristotle and/or Plato, abandon the idea of 'perfect' shapes, and embrace change as an object of study. Nor can you develop geometry or, especially, algebra fully without tools that were first developed by the topologists and analysts.

With those barriers in place, notation is irrelevant; without them, it doesn't matter.

To stick with this subfield of math, it wasn't that Copernicus and, especially, Kepler could do better calculations than Ptolemy, it was that they were working with more precise observations - and had decided to allow observation to trump principle when the two didn't match.

In the same way, it wasn't Maklyn's ability to calculate that was lacking - he could have powered through just as 2 millenia of Earthly astronomers did - it was his mathematical toolkit. And I'm not at all convinced that he wouldn't have broken through to some of those tools on his own in time. Certainly one of his successors would have. Which is why Langhorne's train was off the rails when it pulled out of the station.

HungryKing wrote:While that is true, though it is not just the shackled to the perfect platonics, it was also the nature of people valuing rhetoric above natural philosophy, we do have textev that this was not the case for safehold.
We know that the royal college had managed to shed the philosophical blinkers to an extent, by using the excuse of seeking to understand in greater depths what was given to be known. Just like Coppernicus had no trouble improving the predictions of easter by noting that if you assumed the sun was the center, it was only advocating that this was the physical reality, at a time when the church was feeling repressive, that was the problem: there was no problem, officially in the royal college trying reason out how to get a position fix from astronomic data, which is a spherical problem, in fact it is implied the only novel part was trying to do so on a boat. But we do know that Mahklyn was bottlenecked by his math, there were things the writ and testimonies mentioned that he could almost wrap his head around, but needed the numerals and abacus, and thus the concept of symbolic representation, to fully appreciate.

Louis R wrote:AAMOF, that's the same misapprehension Langhorne seems to have suffered under. The real impediment to moving past the Classical plateau in geometry [which was already pretty highly developed before Classical Antiquity] and algebra was essentially philosophical, not notational. To whit, you aren't going to move beyond those into analysis and topology until you ditch Aristotle and/or Plato, abandon the idea of 'perfect' shapes, and embrace change as an object of study. Nor can you develop geometry or, especially, algebra fully without tools that were first developed by the topologists and analysts.

With those barriers in place, notation is irrelevant; without them, it doesn't matter.

Why didn't the Mayans realize that the wheel would be useful for hauling stones to build their pyramids?

Why didn't the Romans develop the aeolipile into a workable steam engine?

Why didn't the ancient Chinese make the leap from tiny hot air balloons (Kongming lanterns) for signaling to hot air balloons big enough to carry people?

Why did it take ~4 centuries to go from inventing gunpowder to inventing guns?

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Many societies simply aren't friendly to innovation - I'd say most.