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A search on "abacus" turned up a definition from the Britannica Concise, an encyclopedia easily accessible on Yahoo! Reference. The abacus is a handheld calculating aid that's been around for thousands of years. By the 18th century, written arithmetic based on Arabic numerals replaced the abacus in Europe as the merchant's counting tool of choice, but the ancient tool is still widely used in China, Japan, and the Middle East We also discovered The Abacus, a consummate web resource on "The Art of Calculating With Beads." Created in 1995 by Luis Fernandes, who also created an award-winning
Java abacus, the site features detailed instructions for learning abacus addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For our first lesson, we tried an interactive abacus tutorial, but you might prefer to read the manual. The Chinese abacus consists of a wire
grid in a wooden (or plastic) frame with vertical rows of beads strung on wires. A center bar divides the upper rows of two beads each from the lower rows of five beads. Starting from the right and moving to the left, you can designate a ones column to begin counting. Then, the next column over is the tens column, the third is the hundreds column, etc. The counting process consists of pushing beads toward the center bar. Beads in the upper deck have a value of 5. Beads in the lower deck have a value of 1. Instead of counting the fifth unit by pushing the fifth bead up to the center bar, you substitute one of the top beads, by pushing it down toward the center to represent the number five. In the hands of an experienced abacus user, this is done swiftly in a smooth, continuous motion.
After a bit of practice, the process of sliding beads toward the center (from below or from above) and then moving left to carry to the next power of ten becomes as intuitive as the written method you learned in elementary school. Begin with a clear head, an open mind, and put your math fears aside. Then practice. You'll probably find everything you need to know about abaci, how they work, and where to buy them on The Abacus pages. Learn how to build a LEGO abacus or read about the nano abacus built out of molecules in 1996 by IBM scientists in Switzerland. Although the Chinese
abacus is most widely used today, information about Japanese (soroban), Russian (schoty), and Mesoamerican (nepohualtzitzin) abacuses is also available. Now, how about a little Chisenbop finger math?
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