Aspies For Freedom

From Independent on Sunday, 28 August 2005

Ye olde maths textbook found after 470 years
BY ANTHONY BARNES

It could add up to the ultimate test for those who feel academic standards are slipping: a volume of mathematical teasers from the 16th century.

The puzzles, set in 1536 to tax the minds of merchants, are contained in the oldest English arithmetic book in existence, which has been acquired for the nation by the British Library, which will keep it in its collection.

As well as the problems, including questions about payments for clergy, cats scaling trees and market trading, the book gives instructions about calculating weights and the use of an abacus. It also marks the transition from Roman numerals to Arabic figures.

Printed in St Albans by John Ehfurt, the edition of An Introduccion for to lerne to rekyn with the pen, & with the counters is the earliest known copy to have survived. Few practical books from the period still exist, as they were so heavily used that they just fell into pieces. Even later editions of this book are very rare.

The copy had previously been unknown and came to light in the private library of the earls of Macclesfield, Cheshire. It was bought fo £97,5000 with funds raised by the Friends of the British Library and Friends of National Libraries.

A British Library spokeswoman said: "This is the only known surviving copy of the first printed mathematical book in English. It influenced many subsequent books in English about the teaching and study of arithmetic. This book is particularly significant because it marks the transition from a clerical to a secular, merchant culture, and the developing use of the English language instead of Latin. This is an exciting acquisition."

OLD POSER

The rule and questyon of a catte.
There is a catte at the fote of a tre the length of 300 fote / this catte goeth upwarde eche daye 17 fote, and descendeth eche nyght 12 fote. I demaunde in how longe tyme shall she be at ye toppe.
Answere Take vp and abate the nyght of the daye / that is 12 of 17, and there remayneth 5, therfore the catte mounteth eche daye 5 fote / deuyde now 300 by 5 & therof cometh 60, dayes then she shal be at the toppe. [sic]

In fact after just 57 full days the cat will have climbed 285 feet; on the 58th day it needs only climb 15 of its usual 17 feet to reach the top!

B"H

As an aside, I really like this section.  I will try to remain here for a while.  Aeolienne mentioned the discovery of a new prime number in one of her posts.  It may have been an aside.  However, the reason that I mention it is that apparently the old rumor about primes being suppressed in the interests of corporations and governments is not such a rumor.  There is, apparently, an "illegal" prime number.  What a contrast in a "free" society, when we consider that this old mathematics book, in which nothing was suppressed, was written before the Glorious Revolution, before the English Bill of Rights.  The irony of this is astonishing.

The Illuminati have decreed that you shall not see the following prime number: ()

If you read this in a Shakespearean English accent, you can see why they spelled the way they did. Our current method of spelling was standardized in the early 19th century, around 1820. Back then, words sounded like they were spelled. But the pronunciation of words has shifted since then, and several alternative Englishes to Queen's English have emerged (such as Australian, American, Canadian, then there's English as spoken in former British colonies in Africa), so there's a lot of extraneous letters and such. Spanish spelling is a couple hundred years older, but the pronunciation never changed, so there are no extra letters. Some languages, such as French, never had a move towards fixing spelling, so they just sort of evolved into what they are now, which is why French has all those extra letters. (Then there's Asian languages, which use single characters to represent words, so there's no such thing as "spelling" in Chinese, either the character is written correctly or it is not. Arabic and I believe Hebrew writings operate along the Roman model.)

They're not "suppressing" primes. They're keeping encryption keys a secret. If you were a corporation, would you really want your encryption keys floating about? In the same since that many prime encryption keys are illegal to own or distribute, it is also illegal to own or distribute to own the uncompressed binary or any other numerical form of a program that you have not purchased.

Not only in 1536 people didnt notice it . Funny task. I wonder what the oldest recorded task which requires more than just elementary arithmetic knowledge is.

The Arabs were doing algebra when Europeans were in the Dark Ages. In fact, they INVENTED algebra, thus earning the enmity of generations of American high school students. Muslim culture was far more advanced than European culture for five centuries. About seven hundred years after Muhammad Islam turned inward and became much more of a religion-based culture at the same time that the Europeans were turning towards a mercantile culture.

ATM:  Actually, they managed to erase what you were going to show me.  Be more careful next time!

The "Illuminati" was an actual organization in the late eighteenth century. They appear to have been secular-rationalist in orientation.   It included, among its possible membership roster, Thomas Jefferson and old Ben Franklin. There is much that is said about my own country, the United States, being a "Christian nation", but it appears as though the main difference between America and most European countries is that the latter generally reject religion, while the former has redefined G-d in its own image.  We want "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" more than Obedience.  Israel has sadly done a similar thing with Judaism, as much as it pains me to say it.  The watering down of the Truth by popular majorities concerns me much more than the possibility that an eighteenth century secret society may have survived its repression by rival secret societies...