NUMBER STORIES
About four hundred years ago there was born in England a boy named Robert Record (rĕk'ŏrd). When he went to school he was taught to use the Roman numerals, and he added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided numbers very much as Caius had learned to do when he computed with the aid of calculi about fifteen hundred years earlier.
PLAN OF A COMPUTING TABLE
This plan shows the arrangement of lines on the kind of computing table used in most parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was still extensively used when Columbus made his voyages to America
Two important changes, however, had been made in that length of time. Instead of having
places on the computing table for only units, tens, hundreds, and so on, the spaces between
the lines were used for fives, fifties, five
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