Cool video shared by Numberphile on YouTube showing a simple way to multiply large numbers. The method has origins in ancient Egypt and shows the Egyptians were using binary!
“I tried to trace this back and I found it’s very difficult because people in rural areas, before schools, in Victorian times and long before that used to use it. In Elizabethan times, we know they used to use this—this system of doubling and halving. But I traced it back even further…
I traced it back to about four and a half thousand years ago in Egypt. And they did it a slightly different way.”
Ball explains the Egyptian method, as well as how these very old mathematics relate to present day technologies: Binary numbers.
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