The Tribune - Windows

The worst Monday
Aditya Rishi

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit, but its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

— Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827)

"THE story of Dr Feynman and the abacus is well-known, but you should know that Dr Feynman was the best mind of his generation, and abacus is a mind game. There used to be a time when I, too, considered myself the best calculating machine in the world, before Abacus Abu defeated me in a contest. You won't know that; you weren't even born then," says Later 'the calculator' to Mr Processor 'the computer'.

"You got beaten by a toy! Tell me about it," says Mr Processor.

Later: "There was an exciting contest between the Japanese abacus and myself, the electric calculating machine, in Tokyo on November 12, 1946, sponsored by the US Army newspaper 'The Stars and Stripes'. The newspaper's report on the contest was like this: The machine age tool took a step backward yesterday at the Emie Pyle Theater, as the abacus, centuries old, dealt defeat to the most up-to-date electric machine being used by the United States Government...The abacus' victory was decisive.

The report of 'The Nippon Times' of Japan was as follows: Civilization, on the threshold of the atomic age, tottered Monday afternoon, as the 2,000-year-old abacus beat the electric calculating machine in adding, subtracting, dividing and a problem including all three with multiplication thrown in, according to UP. Only in multiplication alone did the machine triumph...

The American representative of the calculating machine was Private Thomas Nathan Wood of the 20th Finance Disbursing Section of General MacArthur's headquarters, who had been selected in an arithmetic contest as the most expert operator of the electric calculator in Japan. The Japanese fielded Mr Kiyoshi Matsuzaki of the Savings Bureau of the Ministry of Postal Administration, a champion operator of the abacus, or soroban as it is called in Japan. It was the worst Monday of my life; the abacus scored a total of 4 points against 1 point that the electric calculator scored. The result convinced the world that, so far as addition and subtraction were concerned, the abacus possessed an advantage over the calculating machine. Its advantages in the fields of multiplication and division, however, were not so decisively demonstrated. Nevertheless, that day, Abacus Abu won a fair contest against me. Then, after some years, you were born and I, too, was forgotten." (To be continued; write at The Tribune or adityarishi99@yahoo.co.in)