26 Aug
2011
26 Aug
'11
1:17 p.m.
the Chinese would have discovered Pascal's triangle centuries before Pascal
And Brahmagupta discovered it even earlier than that. Claim: Multiplying large numbers is faster with pen-and-paper than with an abacus. Proof: An abacus requires O(n^2) time to multiply, whereas one could quite easily perform Karatsuba multiplication on pen-and-paper, taking merely O(n^(log(3)/log(2))) time. Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher