Islam and Montessori

While I was working on my assignment I had to find some facts about fractions and I thought this was really interesting discovery that I wanted to share. Did you know? Did you know that fractions as we use them today didn't exist in Europe until the 17th century?  The word fraction comes from the Latin "fractio" which means to break.  The Egyptians were writing fractions, but because they used hieroglyphs for writing numbers it was really difficult to do any calculations. In Ancient Rome , fractions were written using words to describe part of the whole. As with the Egyptian system, the words made it very difficult to do calculations. Babylonians also had a very sophisticated way of writing fractions. The format we know today comes directly from the work of the Indian civilization. The Indians had developed a system from a way of writing called brahmi, which had nine symbols and a zero. However it was only through the trading of...