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Tally sticks were credit-based money used by the King of England from roughly the XIII to the XIX century. The idea was quite simple: in a credit based system, you have to find a way to represent the credit which is uncounterfeitable and cheap to produce. It also had to have no value as an object, otherwise you can have a market for the object rather than ...

I found about 50 different sources for your quote, all verbatim copies of each other and without any indication of which those tablets were, who discovered them or any hint to catalogue numbers. I truly hate the internet sometimes, please treat this answer as a guess, there's no way to verify exactly which tablets the quote is about. One of the tablets is ...

You weren't kidding. I found those exact two sentences plagerized verbatim all over the Internet. Truly sad. I did manage to find a least a couple of references with more information though. The Handy Math Answer Book was not only original enough to modify the sentence a bit, but included some alternate dates, and a very nice extra aside about one object ...

Yes, there was such a bill, known as Indiana Pi Bill, but it was never approved by the State. You can find a very interesting article on the matter, written by Arthur E. Hallerburg, in the text of Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Search for the phrase House Bill No. 246 Revisited. The whole affair started in 1894, when American Mathematical ...

Diogenes Laërtius mentions several of Pythagoras' travels and he mentions that the philosopher visited the Chaldeans and the Magi: ἐγένετ' οὖν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ, ὁπηνίκα καὶ Πολυκράτης αὐτὸν Ἀμάσιδι συνέστησε δι' ἐπιστολῆς· καὶ ἐξέμαθε τὴν φωνὴν αὐτῶν, καθά φησιν Ἀντιφῶν ἐν τῷ Περὶ τῶν ἐν ἀρετῇ πρωτευσάντων, καὶ παρὰ Χαλδαίοις ἐγένετο καὶ Μάγοις. εἶτ' ἐν Κρήτῃ ...

This paper (in .pdf) argues against ancient Chinese mathematics being aware of prime numbers. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, dating to the 15-16th century BCE, indicates an Egyptian knowledge of primes evidenced in their fractional system, but it's not definitive proof. It looks like the Greeks were indeed the first.

Eratosthene's calculations did turn out to be quite accurate. This was mostly a matter of luck though. He in fact had two major errors, that just happened to cancel each other out. It is also a fact that nobody is sure how big his unit of distance was, and it is only now after the fact that we can take one of the possibilities and say he was only 2% off. It ...

Hmmm. I find that "citation needed" to be a bit confusing. If it relates to the claim of prior invention, that is cited from La cifra del. Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso right there, and David Kahn's book The Codebreakers later in the article. So the claim seems to be pretty well attributed to me. It almost looks like its saying they want a citation for the ...

The ancient Greeks discovered great swaths of mathematics by a process I would describe as "playing with shapes and numbers". I think that the golden ratio was discovered in just this fashion—more though playful experimentation than any particular need to be solved. Παρ' Εὐκλείδη τις ὰρξάμενος γεωμετρεῖν ὡς τὸ πρῶτον θεώρημα ἔμαθεν, ἤρετο τὸν ...