Journey For Hope

The nomenclature of the numbers was based on parts of the human body; at the moment speech of digits that has an origin in the Latin word fingers. Apparently it was the necessity to name the numbers majors of five what forced to adopt the system in base 10. Nevertheless, nowadays, generally, when we touched the fingers with a hand we named the ordinal numbers first, secondly, third party and when we raised simply them we are naming cardinal the one, two, three During the Average Age they were very few people those that knew the tables to multiply majors of five. A very popular method was used that was based on the use of the complement of the given numbers relatively to 10. The complement of I number n a relatively 10 are 10-n.

In this method he was frequent to use the fingers like calculation instrument. It was associated to the fingers of each hand numbers 6, 7, 8.9 and 10, beginning by the small finger. In order to multiply 7 by 8, the fingers associated to the 7 and the 8 are joined, as it is observed in the following figure: The complement of 7 is represented by the three fingers superiors (located upon the fingers in contact) of a hand and the complement of 8 by the fingers superiors of the other hand. The five fingers inferiors represent the five 5 tens, that is to say. To the 50 the product of the fingers is added to him superiors 32, that is to say, 6, giving a total of 50+6=56 that is the result This method to multiply the product of any pair of numbers between 6 and 10 was very used during the Renaissance and nowadays in certain countryside of Europe and Russia. Another very simple method to calculate the table of the nine using the fingers is the following one: It is associated to the fingers of each hand the numbers from the 1 to the 10 beginning by the thumb.