History
Counting rods were used by ancient Chinese for more than two thousand years. In 1954, forty-odd counting rods of the Warring States Period were found in Zuǒjiāgōngshān (左家公山) Chǔ Grave No.15 in Changsha, Hunan.
In 1973, archeologists unearthed a number of wood scripts from a Han dynasty tomb in Hubei, one of the wooden script written:“当利二月定算”，this is one of the earliest examples of using counting rod numeral in writing.
In 1976, a bundle of West Han counting rods made of bones in was unearthed from Qian yang county in Shanxi The use of counting rods must predate it; the Laozi, a text originating from the Warring States, said "a good calculator doesn't use counting rods." The Book of Han recorded: "they calculate with bamboo, diameter one fen, length six cun, arranged into a hexagonal bundle of two hundred seventy one pieces.". At first the cross section of calculating rod is round, by Sui dynasty, triangular rods were used to represent positive number,rectangular rods for negative numbers.
After the abacus flourished, counting rods were abandoned except in Japan, where rod numerals developed into symbolic notation for algebra.
Read more about this topic: Counting Rods
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)