View Single Post
  #6  
Old July 9th 04, 12:32 PM
Michael E. Marotta
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Peter Smith wrote:
Jettons, or reckoning counters, were probably first used in France in
the early 13th century and were ...


Thanks! I printed out the two-page post and stuck it in my special
file folder of numismatic research. It is often said that dealers are
forced to be generalists while collectors have the luxury of
specializing. You prove the point, again.

Among the many interesting historical contexts is the fact that the
jettons ("throws") were used with a "checker board." In the UK, what
Americans would call the Treasury, is still called the Exchequer.
Squares were accounts and jettons were entries. It was a system of
one-to-one mapping.

At the same time, algebra and Arabic numerals were pretty much
entrenched in Venice, Florence, etc. (The city council of Florence
actually outlawed algebra and Arabic numerals in the 13th century I
believe, but the ban could not hold.) In the 1400s, mathematicians in
towns in Italy held public contests in factoring and solving
quadradics and diophantines and such. In the north, however, older
customs lived on.

On the other hand -- and I don't know how historically accurate this
is -- in the recent movie GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, the butcher's
apprentice tells the maid that he will "enter it on the books" that
she owes him a smile. It was also from about that time (Rubens:
1577-1640) that Simon Stevin van Brugghe (1548-1620) advocated the
decimal system as an alternative to fractions. (So says Breen's
ENCYCLOPEDIA.) Even so, German cities continued their fractional
thalers into the 1800s.

Michael
ANA R-162953
Ads