(Untitled)

Pebbles, stones, shells and others
Cavemen grouped and thought of numbers
They'd add, remove what they'd pick
And came up with crude arithmetic

Pebbles, stones, shells and others
Cavemen grouped and thought of numbers
They'd add, remove what they'd pick
And came up with crude arithmetic

Number symbols came with language
And from the primitive, this was the passage
With the symbols came the system
Base 10 evolved 'coz of fingers... count 'em
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

'Round the world sprung diff'rent methods
Concepts were the same just not their words
Egyptians dabbled with surveying and astronomy
And an arithmetic book written by Anmes

Babylonians liked their system sexagesimal
While geometry held the Greeks enthrall
Romans solve practical problems
But for the lot of them no theories were written
(veni, vidi, vici)

Hindus helped make math as we know it
Arithmetic problems in columns were writ
And after them came the transition
When man had machines for computation

Counting machines became the fad
Though counting fingers still make a lot glad
These machines gave way to using zero
But still few theories did people know

In later years some names got prominent
And for discoveries this was the precedent
Fibonacci invented a rule for subtraction
Plus did some more on a lot of functions

Peurbuch managed root extraction
And also did upward division
Then a new style came from Italy
Downward division by Pucioli

In the 14 hundreds they had signed numbers
Positive and negative became like Brothers
Then came words like million and billion
All the way up to nonillion and decillion

More machines in the 17th century
Napier's rod made multiplying easy
But to Pascal and Leibnitz few can hold a candle
Their machines give results at turn of a handle

Then they heard of "Austrian subtraction"
And more methods for division
Someone determined how to get the G.C.D.
So folks were still far from A.E.D.

Stevin spoke things like decimals
To earn him a place among the immortals
Compound interest saw some advancement
And accounting too was to progress bent

So ends my tale of sorts on beginnings
Which eventually lead to higher learning
One of which taught by Sir Balmaceda
It goes by the name of algebra