‘I believe in the Book of Kells!’
“I recall Edward Johnston as a serious and courteous man, weary from ill health, but with a startling and delightful clarity of mind. He was a perfectionist. Once, too briefly and inadequately, I said to him that I did not believe in perfection. His immediate response was: ‘I believe in the Book of Kells!’”
—Alfred Fairbank; quoted by Warren Chappell in A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.
Littera scripta manet
“Littera scripta manet—‘the written word remains.’”
—Horace, his motto; quoted by Warren Chappell in A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.
the number 26
“Ever since the invention of alphabetic writing by the Phoenicians (or at least, by a northwestern Semitic people) in the second millennium BCE, letters have been used for numbers. . . .
Given their alphabets, the Greeks, the Jews, the Arabs and many other peoples thought of writing numbers by using letters. The system consits of attributing numerical values from 1 to 9, then in tens from 10 to 90, then in hundreds, etc., to the letters in their original Phoenician order. . . .
In these circumstances, every word acquired a number-value, and conversely, every number was ‘loaded’ with the symbolic value of one or more words that it spelled. That is why the number 26 is a divine number in Jewish lore, since it is the sum of the number-values of the letters that spell YAHWEH, the name of God.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers; from Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, 2000.
the ‘five-barred gate’
“Everyone can see . . . sets of one, of two, and of three objects . . . and most people can see . . . set[s] of four. . . . Beyond four, quantities are vague, and our eyes alone cannot tell us how many things there are. . . .
The eye is simply not a sufficiently precise measuring tool: its natural number-ability virtually never exceed four. . . .
Perhaps the most obvious confirmation of the basic psychological rule of the ‘limit of four’ can be found in the almost universal counting-device called (in England) the ‘five-barred gate’. It is used by innkeepers keeping a tally or ‘slate’ of drinks ordered, by card-players totting up scores, by prisoners keeping count of their days in jail. . . .”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
2 and 3
Fig. 24.58. Evolution of Indian numerals 2 and 3
“[T]he superposition of two or three horizontal lines, first transformed into one complete sign by a ligature, gave birth to the same forms as the Indian numerals for 2 and 3, whose palaeographical styles vary considerably according to the era, the region and the habits of the scribe.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
The nine numerals
“The nine numerals (of Indian origin) that we use today . . . are drawn in just one stroke of a pen or pencil. This is one of the characteristics of our numeral system, whose remarkable simplicity we forget because we have been using it all our lives.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
zero and the place-value system
“[T]he discovery of zero and the place-value system were inventions unique to Indian civilisation. [Just as] the Brahmi notation of the first nine whole numbers . . . was autochthonous and free of any outside influence, there can be no doubt that our decimal place-value system was born in India and was the product of Indian civilisation alone.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
the little circle
“[T]he word-symbols that the Sanskrit language used to express the concept of zero conveyed concepts such as the sky, space, the atmosphere or the firmament.
In drawings and pictograms, the canopy of heaven in universally represented either by a semi-circle or by a circular diagram or by a whole circle. The circle has always been regarded as the representation of the sky and of the the Milky Way as it symbolizes both activity and cyclic movments.
Thus the little circle, through a simple transposition and association of ideas, came to symbolise the concept of zero for the Indians.
Another Sanskrit term which came to mean zero was the word bindu, which literally means ‘point’.
The point is the most insignificant geometrical figure, constituting as it does the circle reduced to its simplest expression, its centre.
For the Hindus, however, the bindu represents the universe in its non-manifest form, the universe before it was transformed into the world of appearances. According to Indian philosophy, this uncreated universe possessed a creative energy, capable of generating everything and anything: it was the causal point.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
the modern name of zero
“When the Arabs adopted Indian numerals and the zero, they called the latter sifr, meaning ‘empty’, a plain translation of the Sanskrit shunya. . . .
When the concept of zero arrived in Eurpoe, the Arabic word was assimilated to a hear-homophone in Latin, zephyrus, meaning ‘the west wind’ and, by rather convenient extension, a mere breath of wind, a light breeze, or–almost–nothing.In his Liber Abaci, Fibonacci (Leonard of Pisa) used the term zephirum, and the term remained in use in that form until the fifteenth century. . . .
[I]t was Fibonacci’s term . . . which gave rise to the modern name of zero, by way of the Italian zefiro (zero is just a contraction of zefiro, in Venetian dialect). . . . There is absolutely no doubt that zero owes its spread to French (zero) and Spanish (cero) (and later on to English and other languages) to the enormous prestige that Italian scholarship acquired in the sixteenth century.”
—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.
the ‘figure numbers’
“The fact that the Roman numerals were so deeply rooted in the customs and affections of the people at first made it exceedingly difficult for the new Indian numerals, the ‘figure numbers,’ to replace the old familiar Roman numerals. . . . [I]n northern Europe the Indian numerals first began to be used by ordinary people about 1500. This date, the change from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, is the great intellectual watershed of modern history, the time when all the new movements generally came to the fore.”
—Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols; A Cultural History of Numbers, 1969.