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"Popular" is a relative term. Early in the middle ages, long division was considered advanced, graduate-level work.
by panglott 11y ago
"Popular" is a relative term. Early in the middle ages, long division was considered advanced, graduate-level work.
- tamana 11y agoThat can't be right. It may be that very few people learned it (not relevant to most people's lives), but to those who did, it couldn't have been advanced, graduate-level work.
- panglott 11y agoThis is a factoid that I've been carrying around for a while, but it looks sort of true. Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals in 1202, which slowly grew to predominate over Roman numerals/abacus use by circa 1600. So it's not that educated Europeans couldn't do complex division, they simply used abaci and clunky Roman numerals rather than long division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci