A100000 - OEIS

A100000

Middle column of marks found on the oldest object with logical carvings, the 22000-year-old Ishango bone from the Congo.

3, 6, 4, 8, 10, 5, 5, 7

(list; graph; refs; listen; history; text; internal format)

OFFSET

1,1

COMMENTS

The other two columns on the rod are: 11, 13, 17, 19 and 11, 21, 19, 9. See "Deciphering the Bone" at the first Brussels Museum for Natural Sciences link.

This appears to be the oldest known mathematical object.

"The bone owes its name to the site where it was discovered. Ishango is in the Congo, 15 km from of the Equator, on the bank of the Edward lake. This large African lake, one of the sources of the Nile, is 77 km long and 42 km wide. The area is close to the Virunga National Park and the Congo-Uganda border." - Brussels Museum for Natural Sciences

REFERENCES

M. Grousson, "Depuis quand compte-t-on ?" in 'Science & Vie', pp. 58-61, No. 1080 2007 Mondadori/Excelsior Publications Paris.

D. Huylebrouck, "L'Afrique, berceau des mathematiques", in Mathematiques exotiques pp. 46-50, Dossier No. 47, Pour La Science 2005 Paris.

G. G. Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, Penguin Books, London, 1992.

D. Olivastro, Ancient Puzzles, Chap. 1 "The First Etches" pp. 7-30 Bantam Books NY 1993.

V. Pletser and D. Huylebrouck, The Ishango artifact: the missing base 12 link, Proc. Katachi Univ. Symmetry Congress (KUS2), Paper C11, Tsukuba Univ., Japan, 18 Nov. 1999; Forma 14-4, 339-346.

Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts, Lawrence Hill Books, New York, 1973.

LINKS

Table of n, a(n) for n=1..8.

Brussels Museum for Natural Sciences, The Ishango Bone Exhibition.

Brussels Museum for Natural Sciences, The Ishango Bone.

Free University of Brussels, Ishango site

D. Huylebrouck, About the Ishango Artifact [dead link].

Dirk Huylebrouck, A Second Rod, Africa and Mathematics (2019). Mathematics, Culture, and the Arts. Springer, Cham. 177-188.

C. K. Caldwell, The Prime Glossary, Ishango bone

Wikipedia, Ishango bone

CROSSREFS

Cf. A200066.