The Development of Abacues

With the widespread use of abacues, people summed up many computational mnemonics to make the calculation speed faster.
This method of claculation with abacues is called zhuansuan in Chinese. By the Ming Dynasty, abacues had not only been used to carry out all kinds of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations, but also to calculate land areas and the sizes of a variety of things.

Because of its being simple and convenient and its mnemonics easy to remember, abacues were applied in ancient China wide and far, and therefore gradually spread abroad to Japan, Korea, India, the United States, Southeast Asia and other countriea and regions.

The emergence of abacus has been a major reform of calculating tools in the history of human beings. And even today when electronic calculators are prevalent in daily life, it is still playing its special and unique role.

In China, there are a great number of abacus masters in walks of life. The use of abacus can cultivate human thingking ability in addition to its easy operation because it needs a close cooperation of brain, eyes and hands, so it is also a good way to exercise and descipline human brain.

In 1996, IBM scientists have used 10 atoms to generate the world's smallest abacus.