"While we got used to the idea that numbers might not always define a whole thing--a number might be a fraction of a whole--the idea of a decimal point took longer to enlarge. This was despite the widespread use of the abacus, which nearly expressed fractions in the way we know today."Just putting a period in between wholes and decimals took that long to come up with? It's amazing to think that people who invented such complex things such as mathematics and numbers overlooked things we think of today as simple and commonplace.
"So fractional numbers have transformed our ability to think small and understand the dimensions of things like atoms." Fractions may seem like littlwe jerks, but it looks like without them we'd be stuck in the stone age. I wonder why they're so difficult to work with. Maybe they're just too abstract to0 grasp easily.
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