ES. The Ishango Bone

November 18, 2008 · The Mathcast, guests, numbers · Permalink

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Dirk Huylebrouck, the Mathematical Tourist columnist in the Mathematical Intelligencer, tells us about the remarkable Ishango bone, a 22,000 year old arithmetical exercise!

 
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1 Comment »

  1. strauss said,

    April 9, 2009 at 11:34 am

    A correspondent writes:
    I recall hearing your podcast about the Ishango Bone and thought you’d find this interesting. It’s form a piece about linguists trying to preserve languages that may go extinct. 
    I’ve included an excerpt and the URL link
    http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/02/26/1810643.aspx
    The tribe has spoken … but for how much longer?
    One of the most exotic locales for “The Linguists” is in the jungles of India, where Harrison and Anderson tried to blend in with a tribe speaking the Sora language. Getting into the tribal lands is an adventure in itself, requiring special permission and official escorts.
    It’s almost humorous to watch a couple of white guys singing and the dancing with the villagers – and drinking more palm wine than maybe they should. The scene turns a little scary at one point when the white guys have trouble figuring out just how much of a “gift” they should hand over to the tribe’s chieftain.
    But once they get down to documenting the language, the linguists discover something that makes them forget all about the culture clash: It turns out that the Sora counting system blends two counting systems, base-12 and base-20. For example, the number 93 in our base-10 system is referred to as “four-twenty-twelve-one” in Sora.
    “We should try to figure out what these different ways of knowing math are before they all get flattened out and vanish,” Harrison says in the film.

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