Am I the only one who was struck by how much that exam looks like something produced by LaTeX?
MIT Entrance exam (1869)
71–74 of 74 posts
Re: MIT Entrance exam (1869)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those roman numerals don't help with the multiplication at all .
They weren't meant to. The purpose of Roman numerals was to be a convenient notation that you would read on and off of an abacus. All actual calculations were done on an abacus.
Right. That's why "for a Roman, mental multiplication was exceedingly difficult". The representation didn't lend itself to mental calculation.
Re: MIT Entrance exam (1869)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "fine", you mean, "with Bronze Age math", then sure. The Greeks figured some great things out in their time, but your average math undergrad would school their best in most things. We've done more with math in the last 20 years than they did in their entire 600 year history.
Depends what you mean. Some would say that we haven't gotten past pythagoras even with all we have accomplished.
They would be wrong. Calculus is huge. Linear algebra is huge. Boolean logic is insanely huge. The things we can do with numbers now make possible our modern world, something that members of HN don't need me to tell them.
Re: MIT Entrance exam (1869)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends what you mean. Some would say that we haven't gotten past pythagoras even with all we have accomplished.
They would be wrong. Calculus is huge. Linear algebra is huge. Boolean logic is insanely huge. The things we can do with numbers now make possible our modern world, something that members of HN don't need me to tell them.
All of the fields you mentioned get by mostly with modes of mathematic proof introduced by Greeks. In that sense there wasn't much new since Pythagoras until the infamous proof of map coloring theorem recently.