our visual sense, as the photograph and the movie today may 
well remind us. And long before literate technology, the binary 
factors of hands and feet sufficed to launch man on the path 
of counting. Indeed, the mathematical Leibniz saw in the 
mystic elegance of the binary system of zero  and 1  the image 
of Creation. The unity of the Supreme Being operating in the 
void by binary function would, he felt, suffice to make all beings 
from the void.

     Dantzig reminds us also that in the age of manuscript 
there was a chaotic variety of signs for numerals, and that 
they did not assume a stable form until printing. Although this 
was one of the least of the cultural effects of printing, it should 
serve to recall that one of the big factors in the Greek adoption 
of the letters of the phonetic alphabet was the prestige and 
currency of the number system of the Phoenician traders. The