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Why Did Thomas Harriot Invent Binary?
- kazinator 4y ago[flagged]
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoPer the first paragraph of the article, Harriot at the very least beat Leibniz by a century or so.
- kazinator 4y agoBut it appears Leibniz gave credit to the ancient Chinese.
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoSounds like Harriot invented it independently and didn't know about the ancient Chinese.
- ipv6ipv4 4y agoThey didn't do anything meaningful with it.
- cubefox 4y agoHis name is "Leibniz" not "Liebnitz". Sorry but that's two mistakes in a seven character word.
- smitty1e 4y agoVinary?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wslh 4y agoThe quest for the root and archeology of ideas and applications is fascinating. With all due respect with well known scientists like Leibniz, the distribution of your ideas was and remains to be key to be named. It is always nice to keep searching for prior influences and inventions.
- thriftwy 4y agoUnless people are willing to forge "unpublished manuscripts" to gain priority. Need to be careful with that stuff - even when those are legit, the fact that they were not published immensely increases the complexity of priority. Imagine some goat herder invented binary in 4000 BC without telling anybody.
- le-mark 4y agoVernor Vinge had an interesting take on this idea (1969): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatja_Grimm%27s_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatja_Grimm%27s_World
- breck 4y agoFascinating! I was unaware of Thomas Harriot. If you're interested in Leibniz and his invention of binary, I highly recommend Wolfram's post on that: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-gottfried-leibniz/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-g... I have a project on the backburner to create a "Handwriting Simulator", that you could give a task/equation to, and have it generate animations of performing that calculation as a human would with a pen and paper according to a named writing system (binary, roman numerals, hindu-arabic, et cetera). I would like to compare and contrast the efficiency of handwriting systems, and perhaps explore if there are some potential new ones yet to be invented. I've come full circle to the opinion that I've been undervaluing 2D handwritten notations as tools for thought. If anyone has any pointers I'd appreciate it! This reminds me of that, because I'd expect binary notation by hand to be extremely inefficient compared to other systems, so there was little/no value for it until logic machines.
- pge 4y agoHarriot is quite an interesting character. He spent time in the Virginia colony and taught himself the Native American Algonquin language. He had extensive journals of the natural world in the Americas, but they were jettisoned when he was leaving Virginia, and he had to try to recreate his notes from memory when he returned to England.
- sublinear 4y agohttps://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication "Ancient Egyptian multiplication" is also worth mentioning if slightly off topic.
- replygirl 4y agoWorth noting that since Common Core came out in 2010, this is how students in most US states are taught multiplication, only instead of partitioning by powers of two they partition by decimal digits (e.g. 4 * 56 --> 4 * 50 + 4 * 6). Conceptualizing multiplication this way equips you well for handling large numbers in your head. A high school student today might be shocked to see the sort of complexity third- and fourth-graders in prior generations used to contend with for basic operations: 4 * 56 ---> 4 * 6 -> carry the 2, keep the 4 -> 4 * 5 -> (previous step's result) + (carried 2) -> (previous steps' result) * 10 + (kept 4) This algorithm had to be expanded for each additional nonzero digit in each operand. Most of us who did well before Common Core passively learned the Common Core method independently, out of necessity. Lattice method is badass though.
- seri4l 4y agoFor some reason we had something like common core math in my elementary school in the early 2000s and I just had a traumatic flashback. Teacher forced us do EVERY sum like this: 17890 + 456 = 1 x 10000 + 7 x 1000 + 8 x 100 + 7 x 10 + 0 x 1 + 4 x 100 + 5 x 10 + 6 x 1 = 1 x 10000 + 7 x 1000 + (8 + 4) x 100 + (9 + 5) x 10 + (0 + 6) x 1 = 1 x 10000 + 7 x 1000 + 12 x 100 + 14 x 10 + 0 x 1 = 10000 + 7000 + 1200 + 140 + 6 = 10000 + 7000 + 1 x 1000 + 2 x 100 + 1 x 100 + 4 x 10 + 6 = 10000 + 7000 + 1000 + 200 + 100 + 40 + 6 = 10000 + 8000 + 300 + 40 + 6 = 18346 We had to write down everything and weren't allowed to skip ANY step, let alone write down the answer directly. Being taught sums and multiplications graphically is cool, I guess, but this was outright psychological torture.
- replygirl 4y agoMy English teacher in the seventh grade had us write a short story without a single pronoun and without repeating any adjective, verb, or noun. It was basically a hazing, and probably the biggest factor in my being an ok writer
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gladiatr72 4y agoHrm.. (remembering the first episode of Sons of Anarchy)
- kragen 4y agonote also that napier invented binary arithmetic independently a few years later, also before leibniz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_arithmetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_arithmetic unlike harriot, he published his method, in detail, in 01617, in the same book as napier's bones (but three years after replacing prosthaphaeresis with trig functions with the natural logarithm) https://archive.org/details/rabdologiae00napi https://archive.org/details/rabdologiae00napi
- jcrawfordor 4y agoA similar notation for fractional units is used to write formulas for tinting paint. Sometimes you'll see paint color formulas written as a matrix of fractional fluid ounces for each colorant, but they skip some fractions so that the positional values are sometimes 2 or 3. I suppose this makes it a base 4 representation.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoRandom: Anytime is a good time to learn to count in binary on your fingers. It's a nifty trick, especially handy for computer folks.