Chinese Number System
The Discovery
It's History
Time to learn
- Dates back all the way to the 2nd millennium BCE.
- Before they used small bamboo rods to represent numbers 1-9 .
- Now they have different symbols for the different numbers.
- They also have different symbol for tens, hundreds, thousands etc.
- Thousands of bones and tortoise shells were discovered, which had been inscribed with ancient Chinese characters.
- The bones and tortoise shells discovered there had been used as part of religious ceremonies. Questions were inscribed on one side of a tortoise shell, the other side of the shell was then subjected to the heat of a fire, and the cracks which appeared were interpreted as the answers.
Importance of the finds
Who used or uses this system
- Many of the inscriptions contained numerical information about men lost in battle, prisoners taken in battle, the number of sacrifices made, the number of animals killed on hunts, the number of days or months, etc.
- This numerical system was based off the decimal system.
Quotes
Works Cited
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals
To learn and to practice what is learned time and again is pleasure, is it not?"-Confucius
http://www.storyofmathematics.com/chinese.html
"Kill with a borrowed knife"-Sun Yatsen
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Chinese_numerals.html
"Some must get rich first!"-