a MUCH better photo of the icosahedron

[Jonathan Post]

There may still be some seqfans who have not read the wonderful quotation
from Fibonacci in

Post, Jonathan Vos <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/Post.html>. "Arabic
Numeral." From *MathWorld* <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/>--A Wolfram Web
Resource,
created by Eric W. Weisstein<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/author.html>.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ArabicNumeral.html
I've recently written the first 15,000 words of a story called "Fibonacci:
Superspy" and had just finished a chapter featuring a naval battle between
galleys aginst King Roger II of Sicily.  I'd been at a restaurant with Dr.
Thomas McDonough, a student of Carl Sagan's, and a published novelist.  He
made a note when I I told him that the pirate flag "The Jolly Roger" is
named after that same King Roger. As an active member of the Skeptics'
Society, he condemns claims of precognition.  To our surprise, a couple of
days later the L.A. Times ran a book review of another spy novel set in 12th
century Italy, and featuring the same King Roger II of Sicily.  I'd started
writing after, in a dream, I remembered that Fibonacci had dedicated his
first book to Michael Scott.  "The Wizard Michael Scott" in folklore, Dante,
and Sir Walter Scott's writings, who was (bringing this ramble back to the
origin) at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II -- as the official
Astrologer.

Now, I've got to have a golden icosahedron in the story...

On 12/17/06, Gerald McGarvey <Gerald.McGarvey at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> My take on this...
>
> That they are at least read left to right is indicated by 1 being to the
> left
> of the zero in the representation of 10.
>
> Web searches show that nowadays for languages that use Arabic script,
> including Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, etc., numbers are written left to right, in
> fact
> software for these languages needs to have bidirectional script support.
>
> As to why they are written left to right, this document
> http://www.dsv.su.se/~hercules/papers/FarsiSum.pdf
> states 'Persian numbers have the same origin as the Latin numbers and
> are written left to right.' According to this article they originated in
> India:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
> (there's probably more to it)
>
> I think manuscripts might show signs of the numbers being written left to
> right.
> The writer would need to guess the amount of space needed, if they don't
> guess
> correctly,  there could be a gap to the right of the number, or crunched
> up
> numbers.
> That would pretty much be physical proof that numbers are written left to
> right.
>
> More examples...
> Persian (Farsi) numbers 0-10:
> http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/persian_num.gif
>
> Kurdish (Kurdí) number 0-10:
> http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/kurdish_num.gif
>
> Gerald
>
> At 02:56 AM 12/17/2006, Ralf Stephan wrote:
> >Brendan McKay:
> > > Now here is an interesting trivium: Even though Persian and Arabic
> > > are written right to left, numbers are written left to right.
> > > You are all about to jump up and tell me that the order of writing a
> > > decimal positional system is arbitrary, so what I call left to right
> > > might as well be called right to left starting at the high-order
> > > digit. However, that is not correct and I reassert that numbers are
> > > written left to right.  Can anyone guess what my proof is?
> >
> >The fact that our number system is derived from Arabic,
> >and we use it left-to-right?
> >
> >(Not a hard proof but a good reason.)
> >
> >
> >ralf
>
>
>
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