Education: Wonderful World

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One Groove Over. As Author Hogben approaches modern times, he takes his readers painlessly through the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, through Descartes to Karl Gauss. Just as painlessly, he introduces them to algebra, the laws of acceleration, the concepts of mass and weight, binary numbers, and the graph plottings of the parabola and the ellipse. But his major accomplishment will be to give his readers the notion of mathematics as a major part of their heritage:

"Even when we use the electronic calculator we are indebted to the long-forgotten Eastern merchant who first adapted number signs to the layout of the abacus. His predecessor, the temple scribe who gave each pebble a number value ten times as great when moved one groove to the left, first gave ordinary men a clear idea of the use of a fixed base in mathematics. The electronic calculator of today still makes use of a fixed base, though it commonly employs a base of two instead of ten . . . All our modern aids to calculation are the rewards of work done in the past. But the mathematicians of the age of power are using the heritage of the past to forge new tools of scientific thought for the use of future generations."