De Thiende 2026-10-13
Simon Stevin's De Thiende, published in 1585, presents calculation with decimal fractions for practical users. Its notation explicitly labels units, tenths, hundredths, and smaller decimal places; it does not use our modern decimal point. This is a historical example of changing representation to make the same arithmetic operations easier to organize. [ref]
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/stev001thie01_01/stev001thie01_01_0005.php. Stevin, De Thiende, 1585 title page
[ref]https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/stev001thie01_01/stev001thie01_01_0003.php. DBNL edition, description of Stevin's notation and operations
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