Georges Ifrah

Born speaking Hebrew Arabic and French in Morocco, and widely-traveled, Georges Ifrah provides a comprehensive tour of how "numbers" were used by people across expanses of time, place and culture. He shows that the Hand is a computer-calculator [xiv], and was used as such by the Cave Painting inhabitants of Europe. [xiii]

Ifrah also explains many numerical oddities. Why do we still use Roman Numerals (especially in dates, e.g. film credit crawls)? If we have ten fingers, why do clocks have show more 60 minute hours? Why did Lincoln count by 20s in his Gettysburg Address? How did the Inca count using Quipu sticks and knots on a string?

Our "Arabic" numeral forms only migrated from southern India about 1,500 years ago. And now we see the numerals shared by humanity.

"For all our differences, we are united by this great system of symbols." Ifrah explains:

"By their universality...figures bear witness, better than the babel of languages, to the underlying unity of human culture. When we consider them, our awareness of the prodigious and fruitful diversity of societies and histories gives way to a feeling of almost absolute continuity. Though they are only one part of human history, they bind it together, sum it up, and run through it from one end to the other, like that red thread which, according to Goethe, ran through all the ropes of the British navy, so that one could not cut a piece from any of them without recognizing that it belonged to the Crown." [xvi]

"Figures are profoundly human". show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1201874.html

a fascinating read. Ifrah has catalogued the totality of archæological and other knowledge about counting systems since the dawn of humanity, and put it all into a single book, with lavish illustrations (black and white line drawings) of how ancient cultures counted.

It reinforces just how revolutionary the discovery of the concept of zero was - a lot of cultures had groped toward a place value notation system, ie writing 429 instead of (400) (20). show more (9), but this falls down when you try and write 409 unless you have something signifyng nothing. It is pretty clear that our use of it stems from Indian mathematicians of around 800 AD.

A lot of the book is simply well-illustrated cataloguing, but there were a few other points of analysis that jumped out at me. Ifrah lays out several proposed explanations for the origin of Roman numerals, before coming down with an interpretation where they came from notches on tally sticks. His description of the destruction of Mayan civilisation is intriguing and awful - is it really true that only three Mayan manuscripts survived the Spanish conquest? And of course I was interested to see how the medieval numbers that I was once familiar with fit into the longer tradition of the Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Solid stuff. show less

I have to admit that I haven't finished reading this book. With over six hundred, large-format pages and relatively small type, it would probably not have made "Hal's Picks" until next year if I had waited until I had completed it. However, it is entirely possible to dip in for a chapter here and a chapter there. No matter where you peruse, you will find information about number systems and their history that you didn't know beforehand. This book was instigated by the questions of show more schoolchildren to their teacher, Georges Ifrah: "Where do numbers come from?" "Who invented zero?" In striving to answer those questions, he found himself on a quest through history and ethnology that resulted in this monumental piece of scholarship. It is a reminder that the frontiers of human knowledge are not far beyond the most naive question. show less

Man, what a great find. I've been wanting a collection like this, chock-full of illustrations, for some time now. And, bonus, it's a big book (the 2000 edition) but printed on this great thick but lightweight paper, so despite its size it's a light book.

In the first chapter, all the numeric writing systems are gathered and compared (with the glaring exception of Asia, though the Mayan somewhat represents it).