Re: Is Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī Dead?

Marshall wrote:

[snip]

> Of course, these days we have very different calculating
> requirements than we did in al-Khwārizmī's time. A
> polynomial is very, very different now from what it was
> more than M years ago. If nothing else, the rise of
> XML and the Web and their tremendous success should
> make us go back to first principles and consider whether it
> might be time to revive what was once, for centuries, the
> dominant numeric form. In particular, the fact that XML uses
> *text* tags, represents everything as character strings,
> and discards the straightjacket of rigid, well-defined schema
> should make us consider the value of a number system
> that represents quantities as strings of letters without
> any fixed base.

I prefer normalized RN, and I suggest the proper spelling is: MLX. Or is that too much of a rigid straightjacket?

[snip] Received on Sun Jan 28 2007 - 07:10:19 CST