Monday, December 3, 2007

How Numbers evolved

Have you ever thought why ........ 1 means "one", and 2 means "two"? The roman numerals are easy to understand but what was the logic behind the phonecian numbers?

It's all about angles !

It's the number of angles. If one writes the numbers down (see below) on a piece of paper in their older forms, one quickly sees why. I have marked the angles with "o"s.

No 1 has one angle.
No 2 has two angles.
No 3 has three angles.
etc.

and "O" has no angles


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's worth thinking.Noone ever would write the numbers like this.Does 11 has eleven angles?