Counting

Author: Titouan Figueroa

Since the creation of money around the prehistorical age, being sure to have the right amount of money has been a priority. People used to count manually their goods, but with the arriving of calculations machines and the emergence of modern mathematics it became easier, faster and almost automatic.
Merchant from all over the world tried to find a technique that could help them exchanging in a safer way their merchandise with money.

In the seventeenth-century, merchants used Napier’s rod to calculate for example the amount of money they had or the amount customers owed to the merchant.
It was little rods with numbers on it which you had to move on the right position order to be able to do simple multiplications or divisions.
John Napier the mathematician who created this technique had been inspired by Islamic arithmetical calculations.

Another famous calculating machine that has been used for several centuries is the abacus. People still use it nowadays, it is a wooden frame with line containing marbles. This special abacus was used in the early 1900 to count money in Russia with each lines representing a sub division of Russian ruble.

With the economical revolution due to the industrial revolution in England, several factory had issue counting their money. The creation of mechanical calculating machines was a big plus because bosses had in approximation each the sells they made, the costs, the profits, which goods brings the best benefits.
But those machines were extremely complicated and needed hours of training to be efficient enough.

Mathematics helped also for gambling. In 1933 Wembley Greyhound Stadium used a huge electromechanical machine to calculate in real time the odds for each dogs in a dog races.
This help a lot all the gamblers because they didn’t need to look for the best odds anymore since everyone had the same.

Furthermore in 1952 an engineer created a machine that could help visualize behavior of the economy of England. This engineer Bill Philips believed that economy was none other then a mathematical equation and used the flow of water to represent its behavior.

In our current economical area, it’s really difficult to calculate the price of an object or anything you could buy with all the taxes or reductions, that’s why pretty much every Company’s buyer, which does important transactions, carries a pocket calculator.
Invented over 340 years ago, pocket calculator were made with gearwheels and mechanical dials, but the first electronic pocket calculator was created in the 70s. Since then they became cheaper and more powerful.

Commments photo 1	Commments photo 2

To conclude, mathematics help a lot in the development of economy if only in security and simplicity. And nowadays everything that touch from far or near to economy is based on mathematics.