Subject: Re: [HM] A question around zero
From: Bill Everdell (Everdell@aol.com)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2000 - 23:57:58 EST
John Conway writes:
<<To my mind, the "linguistic difference" here is certainly important, as is
the fact that Euclid wrote in Greek rather than English>>
Which brings up a question that one of my classes asks every year at about
this time. What (if anything) is there in the ancient Greek and Egyptian
languages and writing systems that would make it possible to mistake 900 for
9,000 in a conversation between a Greek and an Egyptian around 600 BCE? It's
an easy slip for us because of both the convention we use to write numbers
and because of our base-ten notation with the addition of zero. But for them?
Of course the occasion is the Marinatos hypothesis, which identifies Minoan
civilization at its height in ca. 1500 BCE with the account of Atlantis
supposedly taken down by Solon sometime after 593 BCE in Plato's _Timaeus_
and _Critias_.
Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
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