Progress

A math museum is a funny place to find yourself on a sunny day, but in Bonn the decision to spend your afternoon in the presence of adding machines has a special logic. Bonn is the museum capital of Germany, which itself has the reputation for knowing how to organize and order things, and the museums and galleries I’ve been to in Germany do a fantastic job of curating and exhibiting almost anything you can imagine.

Starting on the 4th floor of an architecturally outstanding building, I found myself diving into the history of Mesopotamian clay tablets, jade Chinese abaci, and wooden Japanese soroban. Using any one of these early rendering devices required more skill than I had first thought, but I wanted to prove to myself that I am not a product of convenient technology and could, if asked to, calculate without a calculator. By the time I reached the 3rd floor (the exhibit descends) I was fascinated by what I imagined was my new favourite combination of things- adding machines and geometric art from the 1930’s. I could see myself dazzling friends at dinner with my knowledge of how the ‘ten’s carry’ came about in the 17th Century, how the growth in interest in adding machine technology reached a fevered pitch in the 1920s in North America just before the stock market crash and how Italians were the masters of creating flow in geometric form by using the right array of colour.

An hour later I found myself on the first floor, punching numbers into a 20th century adding machine and marveling how, with only 5 minutes of instructions, I could easily multiply 43 by 1145. Then it hit me- I hadn’t seen a device between ancient Mesopotamia and New York in the 1920s that allowed me to do more than basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In the 800 years of tinkering with math machines, the innovations hadn’t really changed how much I had to use my brain- I still had to understand math. But in the last 80 years math machines went electric, found silicon, became early computers, and then the complex internal logic of the thing I’m typing on now. The Philosopher/Mathmaticians Alfred North Whitehead once said, “Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas” and as I googled that quote on my smart phone in the exhibit on early computers, I marveled that the evolution from abacus to computer had been such a dull trajectory for so long, only to become the catharsis for our modern age.