Brad found my reading mteral

This book is fun!: Jeff Erickson: Algorithms: "'Algorithm' does not derive... from the Greek roots arithmos (αριθοσ), meaning “number”, and algos (αλγοσ), meaning 'pain'. Rather, it is a corruption of the name of the 9th century Persianm athematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwarizmi is perhaps best known as the writer of the treatise Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fihisab al-gabr wal-muqabala, from which the modern word algebraderives. In a different treatise, al-Khwarizmi described the modern decimal system for writing and manipulating numbers—in particular, the use of a small circle or sifr to represent a missing quantity—which had been developed in India several centuries earlier. The methods described in Al-Kitab, using either written figures or counting stones, became known in English as algorism or augrym, and its figures became known in English as ciphers...


I cannot put the book down, here it is in pdf.  Basic math, in my assumption going in,  comes from commerce, and is aided by writing technology. Phoenicians had multiply, they could afford the paper needed to cipher. The counting rods and counting coins derive from the mud slate used for commerce. And the layout of the mud slat afforded a kind of ongoing lattice multiply for the business that sold one thing, in units of clay jar, for example. His mud slate delivery schedule is  list of partial multiplies.

But my opinion is ready to be chanqed by this book, it looks and reads very fun and complete. It is also a complete text for computing algorithms.