Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/12



The story of our numbers, of the world's attempts to count, of the many experiments in writing numerals, and of the difficulties encountered through the ages in performing our everyday computations — all this is so interwoven with the history of humanity as to have an interest for every thinking person. As the world has grown, so the work with numbers has grown; when the world has faced the mysteries of the universe, numbers have assisted in solving its problems; when commerce and science have shown new needs in computation, arithmetic has always been ready to lend a hand. The history of mathematics is no small part of the history of civilization.

This being the case, it seems proper to relate at least some portion of the story of numbers to the pupils in our schools. It can be made quite as interesting as any other story of civilization, for it touches upon a subject with which the pupils in our schools are in daily contact, adding new values to the problems of arithmetic and giving a new perspective to the whole study of mathematics. v