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Cistercian Numerals
- mynegation 6y agoWritten this way, numerals reminded me of the Ted Chiang’s “Story of your life” (which served as a basis for the movie “Arrival”). Both are recommended. Also I could not help but notice poster’s nick name. Question to them: is there a connection?
- ape4 6y agoA single character able to hold 1 to 9,999 is pretty compact
- VeninVidiaVicii 6y agoIt seems like it’d take quite a bit of staring to decipher.
- hpfr 6y agoAfter reading the page, it doesn’t seem too bad. Each corner represents a digit so you read each symbol one corner at a time. Arithmetic wouldn’t even be that different to learn compared to Arabic numerals since each digit still has a specific place.
- kgeist 6y agoYou only need to remember 9 permutations (which themselves constitute a pretty logical sequence), the rest is a simple combination of them
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI thought the same thing. We do have pretty compact ways to write now though. For example 15,000 can be written as 15k.
- alisonkisk 6y agoIt's pretty similar to writing 4 Arabic digits in a square formation.
- JdeBP 6y agoThere's the notion of "Greeking" in fonts. Given that people have recently been reminded of this system again, I wonder whether the Unicode fallback BMP font that renders glyphs as boxes with four digits, one in each corner, will start to be called "Cistercianization". I suppose that the fact that it is a slight misnomer for a hexadecimal system will, as it usually does with misnomers, only encourage the adoption of the term. (-:
- max_ 6y agoIt cannot count beyond 10,000 Edit: I meant 10,000 not 1,000
- boygobbo 6y ago4 boxes at 4 corners = 9,999
- Jtsummers 6y agoIt seems to use all 4 quadrants around the stave (vertical or horizontal) at least in some forms. Each quadrant can mark the digits 0-9 letting it represent 0-9999. Though 0 isn't called out in the diagrams I'm seeing on the page, the stave by itself should be sufficient to represent that whether the users of it intended it that way or not. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cistercian_numerals.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cisterci...
- detaro 6y agoHow do you come to that conclusion?
- max_ 6y agowas a typo sorry.
- popol12 6y agohow about adding a second character next ? Then you would count to 100,000,000. Just like we do with arabic numbers actually, putting them next to each others. With a single of our digits you can only count to 10 !
- throw0101a 6y agoThe Cistercians have a long and fascinating history: > Andersen et al found that the location monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[21] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[22] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...
- vmilner 6y agoAnd they make nice beer - just had some with my lunch. http://www.mountsaintbernard.org/tynt-meadow-ale http://www.mountsaintbernard.org/tynt-meadow-ale
- danielam 6y agoAlso see the Benedictines in this regard (e.g., "Ora et Labora" and the Rule of St. Benedict)[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pray_and_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pray_and_work
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jccalhoun 6y agoIt seems like someone watched the episode of Modern Rogue that was released yesterday: https://youtu.be/VKB2-gOH7G0 https://youtu.be/VKB2-gOH7G0
- JdeBP 6y agoI would say that inventing the time machine to go back several months and write a Wikipedia article inspired by it is the more significant achievement. (-:
- naringas 6y agovery reminiscent of 'freemason'-style secrecy
- antipaul 6y agoThere are relations between the two. See the link: “In the late eighteenth century, Chevaliers de la Rose-Croix of Paris briefly adopted the numerals for mystical use” Then read more about the Chevaliers
- NoOneNew 6y agoI've yet to see this brought up, but I hope a wandering historian might speak up about this along with reference a book I can read more about this. Wasn't the marvel to Arabic-Hindu (edit) numerals the math system behind them? Beyond counting, no one really discusses the actual use of these other number systems. Maybe the actual number representation with our modern numerals is the worst way to track count, but the way to manipulate those numbers is the best that ever was from what I can tell. All thanks to the folks that laid down the foundation to Arabic-Hindu numerals. Using our current methods of math does not translate directly to other numerals systems... so it's just hard for me to gain an appreciation of these other numeral styles? Years ago I watched a documentary that focused on, I think on Cuneiform writing or maybe another ancient writing system. What was known on how accounting was done, the mathematic usage of that system was a complete pain in the ass. It made me think about how much we take for granted how easy it is to add and subtract, let alone multiply and divide, with our current system. This used to be a specialized skill. Now it's considered the beginning to even knowing anything remotely useful. Weird scatterbrained rant, but is anyone able to point to a good, recommended resource on the history of math, ideally comparing other methodologies?
- FlyingSnake 6y ago> All thanks to the folks that laid down the foundation to Arabic numerals. As an Indian, it is particularly weird for me to see the achievements on Indian pioneer mathematicians attributed to a totally different group of people. Brahmagupta, Pingala, Aryabhatta etc. should be correctly attributed and celebrated for their towering contributions to laying the foundations of Maths as we see today.
- NoOneNew 6y agoRight, yes, sorry. I'm just a casual to the history of math. My bad.
- reaperducer 6y agoAs an Indian, it is particularly weird for me to see the achievements on Indian pioneer mathematicians attributed to a totally different group of people. Unfortunately, the internet is full of this sort of thing. Wikipedia is especially rife with revisions that change inventors and originators in jingoistic ways. See also: The eight thousand tiny museums in villages scattered across the U.K. all celebrating the local "inventors" of different things that were already invented in other countries long before.
- max_ 6y agoNumberphile did a video on this. https://youtu.be/9p55Qgt7Ciw https://youtu.be/9p55Qgt7Ciw
- hsablonniere 6y agoI created a clock with those numbers ;-) https://www.hsablonniere.com/a-clock-based-on-cistercian-numerals--hptit8/ https://www.hsablonniere.com/a-clock-based-on-cistercian-num...
- marcodiego 6y agoImage a segment display of these!
- junon 6y agoMan I wish I knew enough KiCAD.
- thebradbain 6y agoHaha, this is surreal to see. I attended the only Cistercian high-/middle-school in the US, which of all places is in Texas. How they ended up there was due to a series of happy (and many not-so-happy) accidents while fleeing Nazi/USSR occupation. Many of whom would come to be the original Hungario-Texan monks who fled in their teens/twenties (some of them students themselves at a Cistercian school in Hungary who had no intention of ever entering the priesthood) were my teachers, and some still are alive today. I’m not particularly religious, but I always found their order’s history and personal stories fascinating, and a living example of adapting to the cards you’re dealt.
- MithrilTuxedo 6y agoThis would go well with Elian script.
- jephson 6y agoA great little front-end project for generating these numerals: https://adrianroselli.com/2021/02/cistercian-svg.html https://adrianroselli.com/2021/02/cistercian-svg.html
- jacobolus 6y agoHere's a simpler javascript/svg version: https://observablehq.com/@ramonaisonline/cistercian-numeral-notation https://observablehq.com/@ramonaisonline/cistercian-numeral-...