NPR's Scott Simon talks to math historian Glen Van Brummelen about his finding that the decimal point appeared in the 1440s, earlier than thought. How did the decimal point come to be? - the dot that ...

This decimal clock was made by Pierre Daniel Destigny in Rouen, France, between 1798 and 1805. | DeFacto, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes ...

Math historian Glen Van Brummelen came across decimal points in Giovanni Bianchini's manuscript, Tabulae primi mobilis B. Van Brummelen / Historia Mathematica, 2024 For years, historians thought ...

The humble decimal point may have been invented about 150 years before we previously thought. Experts had previously credited German mathematician Christopher Clavius for the innovation, but according ...

So, the number \(5.743\) is said to have 3 decimal places. The number \(5.1492\) has four decimal places, while \(4.34\) has two decimal places. To round a number to a given number of decimal places, ...

Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, was born on December 10, 1851. Among other things, Dewey was a self-proclaimed reformer, so when working for the Amherst College library in the ...

Long ago, our ancestors lived in caves and devised crude, rough tools to help them get through the day. One of those crude, rough tools was human language. Sure, language gave us such things as ...