Napier's bones

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Invention

Domain

Science and technology

Knowledge cost

3

In collections

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What Wikipedia says

Napier's bones is a manually operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for the calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on lattice multiplication, and also called rabdology, a word invented by Napier. Napier published his version in 1617.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Napier's bones”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.