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This sourcebook presents an extensive look at cultural number systems in numeracy and writing systems. Based on a decade of research by the author, the work examines topics such as why Xerxes the First counted his army by having his men march through an enclosure big enough to hold 10,000 of them at a time, why the Hawaiian word for "twenty" means “nine and two,” why an ancient Greek mathematician was driven mad by irrational numbers, and how old counting might be and how we might know this. Along the way, the author describes topics such as dactylonomy, the ancient art of expressing...

This is a book about numbers – what they are as concepts and how and why they originate – as viewed through the material devices used to represent and manipulate them. Fingers, tallies, tokens, and written notations, invented in both ancestral and contemporary societies, explain what numbers are, why they are the way they are, and how we get them. Overmann is the first to explore how material devices contribute to numerical thinking, initially by helping us to visualize and manipulate the perceptual experience of quantity that we share with other species. She explores how and why numbers...