For many years modelling Napier's chessboard abacus was a successful exercise for 1st year students in Computer Science on the module CS126 Design of Information Structures. To gain full credit the students needed to model all aspects of Napier's Location Arithmetic (the final part of his work Rabdology). In the late 1990's they used the language Pascal for this, in the early 2000's they used Java.

This page will soon be hosting a new construal of Napier's ideas using the JS-EDEN environment developed during the CONSTRUIT! Project. This page is linked from a chapter by Steve Russ in the Proceedings volume (publication Autumn 2016) of a Memorial meeting in Edinburgh celebrating the 400th anniversary in 2014 of the publication of Napier's Descriptio ... on the invention of logarithms. In due course, full details will be given here on how to access a skeleton construal of the Location Arithmetic and how to develop it further.

Questions and comments may, in the meantime, be addressed to steve dot russ at warwick dot ac dot uk

June 2016