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David Eugene Smith
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BIOGRAPHY

Professor of Mathematics, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1901–26. Author of History of Modern Mathematics and others.

Primary Contributions (1)
Two vertical tablets display ancient symbols for the numbers one and ten from Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian hieratic, Sumerian, and Cretan scripts, with each symbol shown in red next to its culture and approximate date.
Numerals are the symbols used to represent small numbers, and numeral systems are collections of these symbols together with systems of rules for representing larger numbers. Just as the first attempts at writing came long after the development of speech, so the first efforts at the graphical…
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