> ... They really intended to "use" it. They also wanted to know how
> I found out the Roman method. I should have said I did it the way any
> historian does, by guessing.
I'm glad you didn't say that, at least in this context. For in such
matters, historians don't guess, nor do they imagine how they would have
done it and then ascribe their thoughts to the historical actors.
Historians go back to the original sources and find out how the historical
actors did it at the time. We don't have to guess how people in the early
Middle Ages, working on a Roman heritage, did multiplication and division
with Roman numerals. They used an abacus, and some of them wrote
treatises to explain their procedures. Dating from as early as 1000, some
of the treatises have been available in modern editions for over a
century; many others are extant in manuscript. References to them can be
found in standard histories of mathematics also dating back over a
century. It would be preferable, I think, to suggest to the teachers that
they follow the lead of real historians: go to the library and find out
from the Romans (or at least their cultural successors) how they did it.
Why guess when you don't have to?
msm
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Michael S. Mahoney Department of History Princeton University
mike@princeton.edu 303 Dickinson Hall Princeton, NJ 08544
phone 609-258-4157 fax 609-258-5326
WWW Home Page http://www.princeton.edu/~mike
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