Around when was the abacus developed

It had an impact on the education system of different nations. Although Abacus is a simple counting tool it enhances the overall comprehension of Math and Boosts better and faster calculation skills and improves problem-solving abilities. It would be easy to say abacus training become an essential element of learning Mental Math.

National Level Contest. Join Class If Already Booked. Old Babylonian scholars such as Curricio believe that the old Babylonian used their sexagesimal number system in Abacus to calculate.

There is archeological evidence of usage of the abacus in Greek during 5th-century bc. The Greek abacus was a wooden or marble frame consist of small counters of metals. The oldest counting board discovered on a greek island which is assumed to be bc old. It is a marble slab of cmx75cmx4. In the middle of the slab, 5parallel lines are marked and divided by a vertical line.

Below this line, there is a wide space and a horizontal crack. Below the crack there. Photograph of Salamis tablet. The name of the Chinese Abacus is Suanpan, which means calculating tray.

It is 20 cm long and has more than seven rods. The hard wooden beads are arranged in two parts, there are two beads in each rod in the upper part and five beads in each rod in the bottom parts.

Below each rod, some numbers are written showing the place vale. During the later Ming dynasty, the suanpan followed the ratio that means the upper deck had two beads and the lower deck had five beads. The Roman abacus was a smooth table and some counters, originally pebbles. Later Pope Sylvester reintroduced Abacus with some modifications and after that, it became widely used in Europe. Instead of the counting board in this Abacus wire and beads have been used. During the 1st century AD, the Roman abacus again reconstructed having eight long grooves consist of up to five beads and eight shorter grooves having no or one bead each.

The groups are marked as I for units, X for tens, and so on. The short grooves on the sides are used to denote Ounces that means fraction. The Japanese abacus is known as Soroban. It was imported from China during the 14th century. But Japanese Abacus is a abacus, the upper deck has one bead and the bottom deck has four beads.

The bead on the upper deck has the value five and each bead of the bottom deck has value one. The beads were diamond-shaped. This abacus is often used vertically moved from left to right. The 5th and 6th beads are of different colors for easy viewing and the left bead of thousand is also of different colors.

Abacus was widely used in ancient India. We can find clear evidence of the uses of the abacus from Abhidharmakoshavasya, a book by Vasubandhu, a Buddhist scholar, and philosopher. The usage of Sunya or zero is also mentioned here. The abacus is still widely used in Asian schools and some Western schools also.

In Japan and China, Abacus competition is a big thing. The abacus tool is now mainly used to teach Place values in number systems and multiplication to the children. The abacus is now available in the form of a portable computing device. In the 21st century, the abacus is now used as a teaching tool only. We can use an abacus to solve all kinds of arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

It consists of rods and each rod contains some beads. There are many kinds of abacus present but the Japanese abacus or soroban is the widely used one.

It has 4 beads at the bottom deck and 1 bead at the upper deck. Each rod can represent any number between 0 to 9 that is 10 numbers. The beads above the horizontal crossbar are known as Heaven beads and the bottom one is known as earth beads. We have to count or calculate by moving the beads up and down. Structure of Japanese abacus. When no beads are touching the horizontal bar that means no number is showing. To show or count any number we have to move the beads. Beads which are touching the bar represents a number according to their position.

The number showing in the above abacus is or six thousand nine hundred twelve. For more about Abacus Basics, check out Abacus from Basics. Over it is spread a cloth, bought in Easter term, with a special pattern, black, ruled with lines a foot, or a full span, apart. In the spaces between them are placed the counters, in their ranks.

The accountant sits in the middle of his side of the table, so that everybody can see him, and so that his hand can move freely at its work. In the lowest space on the right, he places the heap of the pence; in the second the shillings; in the third the pounds…As he reckons, he must put out the counters and state the numbers simultaneously, lest there should be a mistake in the number.

When the sum demanded of the sheriff has been set out in heaps of counters, the payments made into the Treasury or otherwise are similarly set out in heaps underneath.

The lower line is simply subtracted from the upper. In the Middle Ages, wood became the primary material for manufacturing counting boards; the orientation of the beads also switched from vertical to horizontal.

In Western Europe, as arithmetic calculating using written numbers gained in popularity in the latter part of the Middle Ages, the use of counting boards began to diminish and eventually disappear by Arithmetic brought about the invention of logarithms by John Napier and logarithmic scales by Edmund Gunter.

In , William Oughtred used these two inventions together and invented the slide rule which lasted until modern times when the scientific calculator became popular in the early s. The abacus, called Suan-Pan in Chinese, as it appears today, was first chronicled circa C. The device was made of wood with metal re-inforcements. Circa C. In Japanese, the abacus is called Soroban. The design of the schoty is based on a pair of human hands each row has ten beads, corresponding to ten fingers.

The abacus is operated by sliding the beads right-to-left. If you hold out both hands in front of you, palms facing out, you will see that your two thumbs are beside each other and two sets of 4 fingers spread out from there.

Similarily, on the schoty , each row has two sets of 4 beads of the same colour on the outside, representing the two sets of 4 fingers and the two inner-most beads of the same colour representing the two thumbs.

The "home" position for the beads is on the right hand side. The bottom-most row represents 1s, the next row up represents 10s, then s, and so on. So, counting is similar to counting on one's fingers, the beads move from right to left: 1 to 10, and then carrying upwards to the next row.

Careful observers will note that the metal rods, on which the beads slide, have a slight curvature to prevent the "counted" beads from accidently sliding back to the home-position. There have been recent suggestions of a Mesoamerican the Aztec civilization that existed in present day Mexico abacus called the Nepohualtzitzin , circa C.

Since it was made from perishable materials it is impossible to know whether such a tool ever existed. There is also debate about whether the Incan Khipu was a three-dimensional binary calculator or a form of writing, or both. According to the author, multiplication and division are easier using this modified abacus and square roots and cubic roots of numbers can be calculated. The abacus is still in use today by shopkeepers in Asia and "Chinatowns" in North America.

The abacus is still taught in Asian schools, and a few schools in the West.