It Could Be Abacuses- so there!
This post has clues and answers from the NYT Crossword Puzzle from Monday, April 19th, 2022. You hath been warned. Proceed with admiration and glee.
The clue was simple- “early calculators.”
But for the life of me, I could not figure out the freaking plural form that fit into the grid last week.
It turns out, my madness was not completely unwarranted. Much like octopus has several plural forms (don’t come after me in the comments, Merriam Webster Dictionary doesn’t lie)- early calculators can either be called abacuses or abaci.
I cannot stop pronouncing it “a-back-ee” in my head. Don’t ask me why, I am just hoping I don’t say it out loud and embarrass myself publicly.
For good measure, an abacus is a counting device that is composed of a frame that holds rods with a specific number of free moving beads. Each rod is a specific denomination, such as units, tens, or hundreds.
This is not to be confused with the pre-Covid toys that our parents let us snot all over in the doctor’s office waiting room. See figure below.
The word abacus is derived from the Greek word “abax” which means “tabular form.” Some version of this counting frame has been used since ancient times giving it the distinct honor of being the first calculator.
I would like to take this opportunity to hold up my iPhone and laugh at my high school math teacher who told me that I wouldn’t always have a calculator with me. You lied.
Ancient abaci have been found in Asia and Europe- notably China and Russia. While the exact origin of abaci have yet to be discovered, they were used well before the adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system which, as far as my understanding allows, can be separated into Eastern and Western Arabic numerals. Western Arabic numbers are based on the 0–9 structure.
There is actually a surprising amount of interesting history surrounding this mathematical device and many countries and curricula still use some form of the abacus to teach fundamental arithmetic.
I have just learned how to successfully tip at a restaurant so maybe I need one too?
For right now, let’s take a look at a few, shall we…
This bad boy is a Sumerian abacus. There is actually another great Medium article that goes into depth about it but for giggles- this device is a table of successive columns based on a sexagesimal number system. That is a fancy way of saying that the number system had a base of 60.
Egyptians possibly manipulated rocks or pebbles for counting in their markets and archeologists have found different sized discs that might have been used for that exact purpose.
This is the Salamis Tablet (aptly named since it was found on the Greek island of Salamis) that dates back to 300 BC, making it the oldest counting board found thus far. It is made out of white marble and is divided by horizontal and vertical lines.
This beauty is a Chinese suanpan. Suanpans were first described in a 190 CE book of the Eastern Han Dynasty, namely Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures written by Xu Yue. Suanpans can come in a variety of widths depending on their use- including adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, find the square root or cube root.
The last favorite I would like to mention is a form of the abacus called the Nepōhualtzintzin [nepoːwaɬˈt͡sint͡sin]- which translated means “the relevant counting.”
Also called a nepo- this calculation device was used in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures including the Mayans. The Mayan numerical system has a base of 20 and included the number zero.
Rome, Japan, Korea, and India also have historical version of abaci. For the sake of solving the crossword hint just remember abaci is to abacus what octopi is to octopus.
Completely irrelevant.
Keep puzzling!
Kasey Rose- NYT Crossword Genius Wannabe
