2 ms·

I've always heard it described as Ethiopian Binary, surprised to see the wiki credit discovery to Egyptians.

• kragen 3y ago
  we have evidence from the 3975-year-old moscow papyrus that the egyptians knew the algorithm then well, one egyptian hacker at least possibly they had learned it from ethiopian hackers but we don't have any evidence of what math the ethiopians did or didn't know at the time; the earliest ge'ez inscriptions are from the iron age, a thousand years later, and as far as i know don't talk about multiplication algorithms it's hard to know what mathematical sophistication the oral traditions or possible other lost forms of writing contained; an ethiopian version of something like khipu or wampum or beeswax tablets or tamil palm-leaf books could have been arbitrarily sophisticated but completely lost by now but that means the people who describe it as ethiopian binary don't know either they're just making up guesses based on no evidence