Napier’s Bones

Napier's bones is an abacus created by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers that was based on Arab mathematics and lattice multiplication used by Fibonacci writing in the Liber Abaci. Also called Rabdology (from Greek ραβδoς [rabdos], rod and λóγoς [logos], word). Napier published his version of rods in a work printed in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the end of 1617 entitled Rabdologiæ. Using the multiplication tables embedded in the rods, multiplication can be reduced to addition operations and division to subtractions. More advanced use of the rods can even extract square roots. Note that Napier's bones are not the same as logarithms, with which Napier's name is also associated.

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