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Brahmic Numerals
The Brahmi numerals are a numeral system attested from the 3rd century BCE (somewhat later in the case of most of the tens). They are a non positional decimal system. They are the direct graphic ancestors of the modern Hindu–Arabic numeral system. However, they were conceptually distinct from these later systems, as they were not used as a positional system with a zero. Rather, there were separate numerals for each of the tens (10, 20, 30, etc.). There were also symbols for 100 and 1000 which were combined in ligatures with the units to signify 200, 300, 2000, 3000, etc. In computers, these ligatures are written with the Brahmi Number Joiner at U+1107F. Origins The source of the first three numerals seems clear: they are collections of 1, 2, and 3 strokes, in Ashoka's era vertical I, II, III like Roman numerals, but soon becoming horizontal like the ancient Han Chinese numerals. In the oldest inscriptions, 4 looks like a +, reminiscent of the X of neighboring , and per ...
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Evolution Of Brahmi Numerals
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or more rare within a population. The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic is common or rare within a population constantly change, resulting in a change in heritable characteristics arising over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. The theory of evolution by ...
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Hieratic
Hieratic (; grc, ἱερατικά, hieratiká, priestly) is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BC until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BC. It was primarily written in ink with a reed pen on papyrus. Etymology In the second century, the term ''hieratic'' was used for the first time to describe this Ancient Egyptian writing system by the Greek scholar Clement of Alexandria. The term derives from the Greek for "priestly writing" ( grc-koi, γράμματα ἱερατικά) because at that time, for more than eight and a half centuries, hieratic had been used traditionally only for religious texts and literature. ''Hieratic'' can also be an adjective meaning " or associated with sacred persons or offices; sacerdotal." Development Hieratic developed as a cursive form of hieroglyphic script in the Naqada III period of Ancient E ...
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Louis Charles Karpinski
Louis Charles Karpinski (5 August 1878 – 25 January 1956) was an American mathematician. Background Louis Charles Karpinski was born on August 5, 1878, in Rochester, New York. His parents were Henry Hermanagle Karpinski of Warsaw, Poland, and Mary Louise Engesser of Guebweiler, Alsace. He was educated at Cornell University and in Europe at Strassburg. Karpinski also studied (1909–1910) at Columbia. Career At Columbia, Karpinski became a fellow and a university extension lecturer. He taught at Berea College and at Oswego, New York at the Normal School there. Then, he accepted a position at the University of Michigan, where by 1919 he became full professor of mathematics. Dr. Karpinski devoted his attention chiefly to the history and pedagogy of mathematics. Books An authority on the history of science, Karpinski was collaborator on the ''Archivo di Storia della Scienza'' and author of ''The Hindu-Arabic Numerals'', with David Eugene Smith (1911), ''Robert of Chester ...
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David Eugene Smith
David Eugene Smith (January 21, 1860 – July 29, 1944) was an American mathematician, educator, and editor. Education and career David Eugene Smith is considered one of the founders of the field of mathematics education. Smith was born in Cortland, New York, to Abram P. Smith, attorney and surrogate judge, and Mary Elizabeth Bronson, who taught her young son Latin and Greek. He attended Syracuse University, graduating in 1881 (Ph. D., 1887; LL.D., 1905). He studied to be a lawyer concentrating in arts and humanities, but accepted an instructorship in mathematics at the Cortland Normal School in 1884 where he attended as a young man. While at the Cortland Normal School Smith became a member of the Young Men's Debating Club (today the Delphic Fraternity.) He became a professor at the Michigan State Normal College in 1891 (later Eastern Michigan University), the principal at the State Normal School in Brockport, New York (1898), and a professor of mathematics at Teachers College, ...
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Karl Menninger (mathematics)
Karl Menninger (October 6, 1898 – October 2, 1963) was a German teacher of and writer about mathematics. His major work was ''Zahlwort und Ziffer'' (1934,; English trans., ''Number Words and Number Symbols''), about non-academic mathematics in much of the world. (The omission of Africa was rectified by Claudia Zaslavsky Claudia Zaslavsky (January 12, 1917 – January 13, 2006) was an American mathematics teacher and ethnomathematician. Life She was born Claudia Natoma Cohen (later changed to Cogan) on January 12, 1917, in Upper Manhattan in New York City an ... in her book ''Africa Counts''.) References *Dauben, Joseph Warren, and Christoph Scriba, eds. (2002), ''Writing the History of Mathematics'', Birkhäuser, Basel, page 483. *Menninger, Karl (1934), ''Zahlwort und Ziffer''. Revised edition (1958). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. *Menninger, Karl (1969), ''Number Words and Number Symbols''. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press. German historians of ...
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Brahmi Script
Brahmi (; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' or 'Lat', 'Southern Aśokan', 'Indian Pali', 'Mauryan', and so on. The application to it of the name Brahmi 'sc. lipi'' which stands at the head of the Buddhist and Jaina script lists, was first suggested by T rriende Lacouperie, who noted that in the Chinese Buddhist encyclopedia ''Fa yiian chu lin'' the scripts whose names corresponded to the Brahmi and Kharosthi of the ''Lalitavistara'' are described as written from left to right and from right to left, respectively. He therefore suggested that the name Brahmi should refer to the left-to-right 'Indo-Pali' script of the Aśokan pillar inscriptions, and Kharosthi to the right-to-left 'Bactro-Pali' script of the rock inscriptions from the northwest." that appeared as a fully developed scri ...
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Kharoṣṭhī
The Kharoṣṭhī script, also spelled Kharoshthi (Kharosthi: ), was an ancient Indo-Iranian script used by various Aryan peoples in north-western regions of the Indian subcontinent, more precisely around present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It was used in Central Asia as well. An abugida, it was introduced at least by the middle of the 3rd century BCE, possibly during the 4th century BCE, and remained in use until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE. It was also in use in Bactria, the Kushan Empire, Sogdia, and along the Silk Road. There is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in Khotan and Niya, both cities in East Turkestan. Form Kharosthi (, from right to left ''Kha-ro-ṣṭhī'') is mostly written right to left (type A). Each syllable includes the short /a/ sound by default, with other vowels being indicated by diacritic marks. Recent epigraphic evidence has shown that the order of letters in the Kharosthi s ...
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Attic Numerals
The Attic numerals are a symbolic number notation used by the ancient Greeks. They were also known as Herodianic numerals because they were first described in a 2nd-century manuscript by Herodian; or as acrophonic numerals (from acrophony) because the basic symbols derive from the first letters of the (ancient) Greek words that the symbols represented. The Attic numerals were a decimal (base 10) system, like the older Egyptian and the later Etruscan, Roman, and Hindu-Arabic systems. Namely, the number to be represented was broken down into simple multiples (1 to 9) of powers of ten — units, tens, hundred, thousands, etc.. Then these parts were written down in sequence, in order of decreasing value. As in the basic Roman system, each part was written down using a combination of two symbols, representing one and five times that power of ten. Attic numerals were adopted possibly starting in the 7th century BCE and although presently called Attic, they or variations th ...
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Acrophony
Acrophony (; Greek: ἄκρος ''akros'' uppermost + φωνή ''phone'' sound) is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: (''alpha''), (''beta''), (''gamma''), (''delta''). The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet, in which the letter A, representing the sound , is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox, and is called "ox", ''ʾalp'', which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. The Latin alphabet is descended from the Phoenician, and the stylized head of an ox can still be seen if the letter A is turned upside-down: ∀. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is ''bet'' (which means "house" and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound and fro ...
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Demotic (Egyptian)
Demotic (from grc, δημοτικός ''dēmotikós'', 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, and the stage of the Egyptian language written in this script, following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek. Script The Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as ', "document writing," which the second-century scholar Clement of Alexandria called , "letter-writing," while early Western scholars, notably Thomas Young, formerly referred to it as " Enchorial Egyptian." The script was used for more than a thousand years, and during that time a number of developmental stages occurred. It is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphs could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or ...
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Kharosthi
The Kharoṣṭhī script, also spelled Kharoshthi (Kharosthi: ), was an ancient Indo-Iranian script used by various Aryan peoples in north-western regions of the Indian subcontinent, more precisely around present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It was used in Central Asia as well. An abugida, it was introduced at least by the middle of the 3rd century BCE, possibly during the 4th century BCE, and remained in use until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE. It was also in use in Bactria, the Kushan Empire, Sogdia, and along the Silk Road. There is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in Khotan and Niya, both cities in East Turkestan. Form Kharosthi (, from right to left ''Kha-ro-ṣṭhī'') is mostly written right to left (type A). Each syllable includes the short /a/ sound by default, with other vowels being indicated by diacritic marks. Recent epigraphic evidence has shown that the order of letters in the Kharosthi ...
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Ashoka Brahmi Numerals 256
Ashoka (, ; also ''Asoka''; 304 – 232 BCE), popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was the third emperor of the Maurya Empire of Indian subcontinent during to 232 BCE. His empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent, stretching from present-day Afghanistan in the west to present-day Bangladesh in the east, with its capital at Pataliputra. A patron of Buddhism, he is credited with playing an important role in the spread of Buddhism across ancient Asia. Much of the information about Ashoka comes from his Brahmi edicts, which are among the earliest long inscriptions of ancient India, and the Buddhist legends written centuries after his death. Ashoka was son of Bindusara, and a grandson of the dynasty's founder Chandragupta. During his father's reign, he served as the governor of Ujjain in central India. According to some Buddhist legends, he also suppressed a revolt in Takshashila as a prince, and after his father's death, killed his brothers to ascend t ...
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