Who invented the abacus and where was it invented?
The origins of the abacus are disputed; many cultures are known to have used similar tools. It is known to have first existed in Mesopotamia[1][2] and China,[3] and was invented sometime between 1000 BC and 500 BC.[4] The first abacus was almost certainly based on a flat stone covered with sand or dust. Words and letters were drawn in the sand; eventually numbers were added[5] and pebbles used to aid calculations. From this, a variety of abaci were developed; the most popular were based on the bi-quinary system, using a combination of two bases (base-2 and base-5) to represent decimal numbers. The use of the word abacus dates from before 1387, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from abakos, the Greek genitive form of abax (“calculating-table”). Because abax also had the sense of “table sprinkled with sand or dust, used for drawing geometric figures”, some linguists speculate that the Greek word may be derived from
I googled the history of the abacus and came up with this interesting website. http://fenris.net/~lizyoung/abacus.
