Chapter 3 Taming the Infinite

As I mentioned before most of the ancient civilizations had their own way of writing numerals. In this chapter we go through the Romans, Greeks, Indian, Arabic Italian and the Mayas.

What I found interesting about this chapter is that most of these numerals are related either because of political matters or because of trading between each other. They each adopt their numerals to other countries, and as a result we have numerals that are much like the ones we have today.

This chapter also introduces us to the negative numbers which at the beginning didn’t actually mean that a value was less than zero but that it was a subtraction (according to the Chinese it represented debt).

The one thing that really got me mad about this chapter is a mistake often made (even by the History Channel): Mayans did not live in South America, only in CENTRAL America. South America did have indigenous tribes, but they were not Maya, one example is the Incas.