The Story of One

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Across
  1. 6. Italian mathematician who introduced Indian numerals to medieval Europe in his 1202 Book of Calculation
  2. 8. Rotates: what the Earth does on its axis — a fact Indian scientists established long before Europeans accepted it
  3. 9. Greek philosopher and mathematician who believed the entire universe was made of numbers
  4. 10. The caliph who ruled Baghdad and received the gift of Indian numerals from an ambassador — transforming Islamic mathematics
  5. 11. Ancient Mesopotamian civilisation that first used clay tokens to represent numbers and invented arithmetic
  6. 14. An Indian cosmic unit of distance: the path covered by a deity travelling a million kilometres per blink of an eye for six months
  7. 16. British location where the world's first working binary computer was installed to crack German codes in World War II
  8. 18. The mathematical operation first made possible by Sumerian clay tokens — adding and taking away
  9. 21. Ancient country whose philosophers asked what everything is made of — and whose thinkers pioneered theoretical mathematics
  10. 23. The country in which zero was invented, and whose scientists proved the Earth orbits the Sun — a thousand years before Copernicus
  11. 25. The Ishango ___: a 20,000-year-old counting object found in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo
  12. 26. Small clay object used by the Sumerians to represent a quantity; the world's first physical symbol for the number one
  13. 28. 17th-century mathematician who invented the binary system, convinced that one and zero were the only numbers the universe truly needed
Down
  1. 1. African country where the Ishango bone — evidence of counting some 20,000 years ago — was unearthed
  2. 2. A frame with beads or counters used for calculating in medieval Europe; eventually defeated by Indian numerals
  3. 3. Symmetrical about its centre — like a well-balanced number system where position determines value equally on both sides
  4. 4. City in northern India where the oldest known written zero is carved inside a small temple
  5. 5. Ancient Greek city-state where Archimedes was born, lived and killed — cradle of theoretical mathematics
  6. 7. Religious community members; in medieval Europe, they were among the guardians of mathematical and scholarly knowledge
  7. 8. The Arabic word for zero, which also gave us our English word for a secret code
  8. 12. Ancient civilisation that defined the cubit as a standard unit of measurement for its monumental building projects
  9. 13. Greatest mathematician of ancient times, killed by a Roman soldier in Syracuse in 212 BC whilst deep in calculation
  10. 15. Describes a city-dweller; the Sumerians needed arithmetic partly because so many people lived together and had to share grain
  11. 16. Capital of the Islamic caliphate in the 8th century, where an Indian ambassador presented the gift of Indian numerals
  12. 17. An almost unimaginable unit of time in Indian philosophy: it would take one to build a 10km cube of wool, one strand per century
  13. 19. Name of the 20,000-year-old animal bone found in the Congo, one of the earliest pieces of evidence for counting
  14. 20. The number whose first undisputed written example was found in Gwalior — and which later teamed up with one to rule the digital world
  15. 22. The number system invented by Leibniz, made of only ones and zeros, and used by all modern computers
  16. 24. To work out or deduce — what a mathematician does when reasoning from numbers to conclusions
  17. 27. Egyptian unit of length: the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger