How did people count before Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci?
Upvote:2
Most likely they did not know how to count, except for the very basics, such as counting on their fingers and adding up small values. In the middle ages mathematics had a heavy foundation in arithmetic, and therefore the Ph.D. in Mathematics would be roughly equivalent to a third grader's homework today. Since academics and education did not have a emphasis in the middle ages, most people would not have explored number theory (even a most "primitive" case of coming up with zero). The monks, aristocracy and other educated people would have used the clumsy Roman Numeral system. Most common people were illiterate so they did not write down numbers, and did not understand numbers or number systems.
Upvote:2
The Liber Abaci is not about counting. Almost all of it are solutions to various algebra problems. The first chapter describes the Arabic numerals. The second shows how to multiply using Arabic numerals and it gets more complicated from there. So, it is not really a book about "counting".
Throughout the middle ages and going back to Roman times the standard method of doing advanced arithmetic was the counting table:
The woodcut above that dates to around 1500 shows a typical counting table. It functioned much like an abacus. The user would draw lines on the table and then arrange pebbles to do calculations. In Latin the word for a pebble is "calculus". This leads to our words such as "calculation" and "calculus".
After Fibonacci, some people started to do calculations using Arabic numerals and it became a competing system. In fact, believe it or not there were contests between "algorists" that used Arabic numerals and "calculators" that used the old Roman method using pebbles. This dual system continued well into the 1600s, more than 400 years after the Liber Abaci was written.
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