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Napier's Bones Who invented/ created/ discovered Napier's Bones? Napier's Bones was created by John Napier of Merchiston (1550 - 1617). He was also known as the Marvellous Merchiston. John Napier was a famous Scottish theologian and mathematician. In addition to being an educated man, Napier was also a nobleman, a baron, the 7 th Laird of Merchiston, and owner of a considerable estate. He was famous for the invention of logarithms and for popularizing the use of the decimal point.
One of Napier's greatest hits includes such groundbreaking texts as A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms, and his invention of divining rods used as multiplication tables. What is Napier's Bones? A set of rods, made of bone or other material, each divided into nine spaces, and containing the numbers of a column of the multiplication table. It facilitates the operations of multiplication and division.
Where was Napier's Bones discovered/ created? The worlds first practical calculator, one that could multiply, divide and find roots was developed in England during the latter part of the 16 th century. John Napier's description of what we usually call Napier's Bones comes to us through the book Rabdology (a term coined by him) or "Calculation with Rods. " When was it discovered/ created? In 1617, John Napier published Rabdologia, a book that contained a description of the rods that he had developed to aid in multiplication, division, and the extraction of square roots. Napier's bones have since become popular as a way of demonstrating multiplication to school students. How was it used then and now?
Napier's bones, also called Napier's rods, are numbered rods which can be used to perform multiplication of any number by a number 2 - 9. By placing "bones" corresponding to the multiplier on the left side and the bones corresponding to the digits of the multiplicand next to it to the right, and product can be read off simply by adding pairs of numbers (with appropriate carries as needed) in the row determined by the multiplier (Weisstein, 2002). There are ten bones corresponding to the digits 0 - 9, and a special eleventh bone that is used the represent the multiplier. The multiplier bone is simply a list of the digits 1 - 9 arranged vertically downward. The remainder of the bones each have a digit written in the top square, with the multiplication table for that digits written downward, with the digits split by a diagonal line going from the lower left to the upper right. In practice, multiple sets of bones were needed for multiplication of numbers containing repeated digits (Weisstein, 2002).
Why is it important in the study of math? The rods used in Napier's bones are but a clever use of what we call the multiplication table. Napier's bones helps solve mathematical operations, particularly multiplication. References: Weisstein, Eric W. Napier's Bones. From Math World A Wolfram Web Resource.
web 2002 Hansen, Jim. John Napier's Bones. web 2007
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