The ancient Chinese abacus is not as suitable for mathematicalĬalculations as the soroban. The reason is that the soroban displays numbers in base 10 in a way that makes calculating easy.
SOROBAN MATHS HOW TO
In China the Ancient Chinese abacus with seven beads is still being used by older people, but since 1980s, the Chinese have begun to teach children how to use the Soroban, the Japanese Abacus in a selection of trial schools. Word "abq" which translates as dust/sand.
In fact, it is thought that the word "abacus" comes from the Greek word "abax" meaning tray/table/tablet which originated from the Semitic The columns were made by simply running your finger through the tray. The original Greek abacus was a table with a raised edge, filled with sand.
In the 5th century BC, similar devices were being developed by the Zapotecs of Central America and the Greeks. This meant they could "rub out" as they calculated. Later, the Sumerians abandoned the objects and simply drew on the board. This is one of the first versions of what we now call the abacus. Little wooden or reed sticks, or clay pellets were used to place on the columns to make numbers. These columns corresponded to the order of size in their counting system (which was base 60) - just like we write sums with units, tens, hundredsĬolumns etc. This was a large block of wood or clay with columns traced out. Each different type of object represented a different order of sizeĪround 2700 BC, the Sumerians invented their own tool for calculating. Between 90 BC, people in the Middle East were using stones, clay objects, rods and spheres to perform calculations. However it has been very hard to find out exactly what they meant or how they were used. It looks much more complicated than the metric system of length which uses base 10! To find out more about writing numbers in different bases, look at " Back to the Planet of Vuv ".Īrchaeologists have discovered bones and rocks etched with some form of numerical symbols dating back to 20 000 BC. In the old British imperial system of measuring, there are 12 inches to a foot and then 3 feet to a yard. The most common base is 10, but we still use base 60 when we tell the time: This just means the way the numbers are grouped. This sounds very strange - don't we all count in the same way? The answer to that is, in fact, no. The tools that different civilisations used were dependent on the way that they counted. What did people do to save time working out more difficult problems before the calculator existed? Calculators have become more and more advanced, and can do a multitude of different things. Nowadays the calculator is very familiar to many of us. Maybe it would help to jot something down. Perhaps you'd be able to calculate it mentally, "in your head". When you are asked for the answer to an addition sum for example, how do you go about working it out? Well, I imagine that your method would depend on the sum itself.
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