| Show merchants of old good at figuring tabb tablets ets reveal babylonian merchants more than years ago knew enough about simple and compound interest to charge their customers rates as high as 20 per cent per year according to ancient and clay tablets which once were babylonian textbooks ol of arithmetic and algebra are deposited in libraries at berlin and at yale university unlike modern textbooks ot of these mathematical sciences the babylonian documents do not describe general principles ot of calculation instead they reh resemble emble modern devices such as the multiplication tables or tables of fractions thi is one reason why the abilities ol of the ancient babylonian math and bookkeepers not realized by students of the tablets until an authority discovered what they really meant another difference between baby ionian and modern mathematics is that the babylonians did not count by tens but by sixties numbers larger than 60 were expressed in powers of that number nu niber such as squares or cubes numbers smaller than 60 were expressed in fractions of 60 one half balf one third and so on |
