The abacus is perhaps the earliest mathematical device, if you don’t count making marks in the sand or cave paintings. It’s the ancient equivalent of a pocket calculator. The “hackers” of the Bronze Age definitely used abacuses.
The full story of the invention of the abacus is unknown. Historical records of its use date back as far as 2700 BC in Mesopotamia (approximately where Iraq and parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey exist today), as well as ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, Persia (the precursor to modern-day Iran), Japan, Russia, and Korea. The revolutionary abacus traveled the world centuries before motor engines and the printing press! But the device might be even older.
Abacuses are still manufactured, and they are frequently seen in young children’s classrooms. Some modern abacuses are also designed for blind people, such as the Cranmer Abacus, invented by Terence Cranmer of the Kentucky Division of Rehabilitation Services for the Blind in 1962.
Abacus designs vary, but their defining feature is a set of bars in rows or columns, usually in some sort of frame, with beads or similar objects as counters that can slide across each bar to change position horizontally (on a row) or vertically (on a column).
Here’s how an abacus works. Each bar can represent a position in a numeral system, and then the placement of the counters on a bar ...
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