Word: abacus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and James Bryant Conant '14, along with hundreds of other well-known alumni, have uncovered the news, written the editorials, photographed the local scene, and handled the abacus side of an operation which has long been one of the student's most profitable ways of spending his extra-curricular time...
...Egyptian Ahmes, the Moonborn, described the almost exact formula for determining the area of a circle. By using tables of squared numbers,* the Mesopotamians learned to multiply without the use of an abacus. Pythagoras, who was the leader of a secret mathematical and religious sect, stated his famous theorem about right triangles (the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides). After him came even greater names: Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, who estimated the circumference of the earth (about 24,000 miles), and Hipparchus, who anticipated the modern tables of sines...
...Even when we use the electronic calculator we are indebted to the long-forgotten Eastern merchant who first adapted number signs to the layout of the abacus. His predecessor, the temple scribe who gave each pebble a number value ten times as great when moved one groove to the left, first gave ordinary men a clear idea of the use of a fixed base in mathematics. The electronic calculator of today still makes use of a fixed base, though it commonly employs a base of two instead of ten . . . All our modern aids to calculation are the rewards of work...
...Shift. IBM's success in office automation was built on machines of cogs and gears; its swift tabulating machine was basically only a mechanical improvement on the first one built by Blaise Pascal in 1640, which in turn was an improvement on the ancient Chinese abacus. But in the last few years there has been a profound change in the business. The mechanical cogs and gears have given way to electronic circuits, cathode-ray tubes and transistors. For IBM the change could not have come at a better time. Tom Watson Sr.. who had improved his machines close...
...Satyrs, James Wood and Loring Bruce displayed a degree of uninhibited rambunctiousness that is probably unparalleled in the history of Paine Hall. And Douglas Saxe, dextrously manipulating his abacus, was quite convincing as the Mathematician. He sang with great verve, and upheld the high standard of comedy. The always lovely voice of Dorothy Barn-house made the minor role of the goddess a powerful and moving experience...