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?
It
was the Arabs who added the line
(sometimes drawn horizontally, sometimes on a slant) which we now use to
separate the numerator and denominator.
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 the Arabs that the Indian numerals were spread to Arabia where they were used in the same form.
In India fractions were written very much like we do now, with one
number (the numerator) above another (the denominator), but without a line.
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