I thought this reading is incredibly interesting and thought provoking. It also made me realize the existence of these little ‘glitches in the matrix’, where things are happening out of the time that you would typically associate with them. Let me explain. For example, the system that the romans developed for the adding up their numerals, is exactly an algorithm that we would feed today’s computers. As another example, Alan Turing while developing the mathematical framework of general purpose computers, also developed Turing machines, which are theoretical general purpose computers that compute everything using the Unary system which is a very similar system to what the pre-historic farmers mentioned in the text used. Another thing I noticed throughout the reading is that the Author is desperate for the mathematicians and people he wrote about to make the jump to universality. I would argue that a lot of them didn’t need to, they developed number systems that were suitable for them, and didn’t need a universal number system.