The Comparing Research On The Abacus In Ancient China And The West

Abacus has appeared in Chinese and Western history, but there do have some different trajectories between China and the West. In ancient China, abacus played very important and indispensable role in business and mathematics while in the West abacus' s original form appeared earlier but didn't get fully developed. Before abacus was invented, China had already had a set of relatively complete chip count computing system, but due to the needs of the commercial trade, the superiority of the abacus, the algorithm changes and so on,gradually replaced by the chip count abacus. Furthermore, in the West before the abacus,calculation was very simple to calculated, after abacus was invented, also did not form a relatively complete computing system, so gradually it was replaced by more advanced computational tools.For the time abacus invented exists many to say, which makes the long-standing debate about the origin of the abacus, based on the existing historical data, research and objective comparative analysis of these arguments, we draw the conclusion: Chinese abacus may have appeared in the late Tang Dynasty with many possibilities, but so far there is no direct evidence to prove; direct evidence abacus appeared in the early Song Dynasty while the primitive form of Western abacus appeared relatively early. But Chinese abacus calculation system is much higher than the West, the significant of the abacus in history of China is far from western one can be compared. This is mainly due to the ancient Chinese invented the perfect Abacus formulas, which sounds like "software" system; Westerners invented other computational tools instead of abacus as their goal. For the Chinese nation, no matter from the history of invention and mathematics or any other aspects, abacus and the rules of its operation are important iconic symbol, which has been deeply rooted in our history and culture, become an integral part.