omgimsuchadork:apenitentialprayer:synthetic-blanket-hairs:thechildofchristmas:bourtange: neato: a 13
omgimsuchadork:apenitentialprayer:synthetic-blanket-hairs:thechildofchristmas:bourtange: neato: a 13th-century number notation system created by european monks this is…. actuallly really cool?like, this is probably the shortest number notation in existence and yeah, it’s tricky to use and absolute hell for doing math with, but the ability to denote a 4-digit decimal number into a single character is just really cool as an engineer and it probably had a ton of uses back then like denoting quantities or maybe even secret codeyou can probably draw this on a combination lock to remember the password and people would be none the wiser @foobar-the-great From the source:This ‘forgotten’ number-notation was developed in the late 13th century by Cistercian monks in what is now the border region between France and Belgium (particularly Aulne-sur-Sambre in the diocese of Liège and Vaucelles in the diocese of Cambrai). It was used by the Cistercians – admittedly by only a few but nevertheless all over Europe – for at least two centuries thereafter, as an alternative to the well-known Roman numerals and the less-well-known, ‘new’ Hindu-Arabic numerals (whose introduction into Europe took five centuries). The monks used it for numbering pages of manuscripts and items in lists, for writing for representing year-numbers in dates, and for numbering staves of music. The two dozen surviving manuscripts featuring ciphers are from localities between England and Normandy to Italy and between Spain and Sweden. Numberphile did a video on this! Also threw in a teensy bit of Cistercian sign language. -- source link