Sistema de numeración Inka en la Yupana y el Khipu

Abstract

As cultures grow they must count and calculate, in turn creating their own systems of numeration and ways of representing numbers; it was not different in the case of Inka culture. In this paper we formulate a hypothesis about the Inka numeration system in the Yupana and Khipu, and its respective algebraic equivalence using summation theories, matrices, and vectors. We also present a software based on those algorithms and developed for Android “YupanaInka.apk”, which allows one to simulate the mathematical computation of the Yupana. This work was motivated by an attempt to recover the ancestral knowledge of Inka mathematics in order to strengthen and/or develop the identity process in Tawantinsuyo.

Keywords

• Yupana
• Khipu
• Taptana
• Inka
• Ethnomatematical
• Mathematics
• TICs