CH 28: Quipu to Mathematica
Perhaps an effective method to assess the level of scientific sophistication in a society is to examine the tools they use for mathematics. Many ancient civilizations considered the abacus landmark in allowing people to calculate quickly. The Incan civilization did not have written word but used knots called Quipu to indicate numbers and make computations. The slide rule helped along scientific progress in the twentieth century. In more recent times we can certainly consider software as mathematical tools of the trade. For example, the software Mathematica is able to compute, calculate and solve problems of depth and breadth that would have appeared like alien technology to our ancestors even one generation ago.
As further evidence of the sophistication of modern tools, scientists at IBM Research Division's Zurich laboratory built the classic math tool, the abacus, except that they did so with the individuals beads each having a diameter of about one nanometer, which is about one millionth of a millimeter. Please ask the World Wide Web about Archimedes for more information.
OCT: Original Counting Technology