TripleEntryAccounting

From UoWiki

"Money. One of the "shattering simplifying" ideas of all time, money quantifies everything. Around 1300 Europeans took another giant step towards abstraction by introducing the notion of "money of account"--a currency used for keeping books but not necessarily for actually exchanging money. (The euro is like that now.) Money of account provided for finance what measures did for music or minutes for time-- a common unit of measurement. It made possible double entry bookkeeping, "a mirror in which the adept sees both himself and others." Double entry books, introduced at the beginning of the fourteenth century, record assets and liabilities separately. Ever since, bookkeeping has had a pervasive influence on the way we think, especially on our practice of dividing things into black and white, good and evil, this or that. "In the past seven centuries bookkeeping has done more to shape the perceptions of more bright minds than any single innovation in philosophy or science."

from "Music, Money, and Maps", The Measure of Reality, Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 by Alfred W. Crosby, Cambridge University Press, 1997

See also :

• http://www.bham.ac.uk/EAA/eaa99/abstracts/ATH111B!.html
• http://linas.org/mirrors/www.gldialtone.com/2001.07.14/STRaccountant.htm
• http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/book1.html