Think of a Number

Aged about 11, still overwhelmed by the malevolent chaos of 'the big school', I got 100% in a maths test - the only one in the class to do so. Seven years later, I got 40% - precisely the pass mark - in a maths test, so narrowly escaped having to resit the paper and face getting slung out of university. Today's lunchtime podcast mentioned that mathematicians peak early; QED

From the podcast, we discovered that 2025 is the anniversary of one of the key events that led to the Renaissance and the scientific development of western Europe - an event in 1225. If I had done my maths tests in 1225, there is no doubt I would have failed them both. All the questions and all the answers would be in Roman numerals. Outside of Moorish Spain, the whole of Europe relied on them. 1066 and all that, Domesday book, taxes, the administration of monasteries, rents, military logistics. When I think about all these things, it has never occured to me how hard it must have been with that cumbersome system

In 1225, we discovered, the Holy Roman Emperor, king of Germany, Italy, Sicily and Jerusalem, the most powerful man in Europe, scholar, polymath, went personally to Tuscany to meet Leonardo of Pisa, nickname Fibonacci. This was a key link in the chain that took our familiar numbering sytem from its roots in India, via the Islamic world to the north African Arabs, to Fibonacci (who was fluent in Arabic and never failed a maths test, even the ones the Emperor set him), via the Emperor's court, to Renaissance Italy and the rest of Europe

It's all so familiar now: the symbols from. 1-9; the very existence of the concept of zero, the significance of the position of the symbol (units, tens, hundreds). We learn it, of course, but it soon becomes second nature; we can't imagine any other way. Yet it's all so new: only eight Jimmy Carters ago, we had no such ideas

This history has all been written up in William Dalrymple's 'Golden Road'. In his podcast descussion of this journey of knowledge, he somewhere mentions the first Astrolabe, made possible by the astronomy (and astrology) that this maths was developed to support. A working model of the rotating spheres - then tonight, here they were, outside the back door. That's Venus chatting to the moon and Saturn at 10-o'clock, confirmed by the Astrolabe that we now call a smartphone; simple as 1,2,3

Late edit: it's good be leading the news