or issuing notes or tokens that are accepted by the community. Pythagoras introduced coinage into Southern Italy around 500 B.C. In his time, one of the prominent questions thinkers were asking was “What are things made of?” Some said fire, some said water, or earth, air, or some combination thereof. Pythagoras was one of the first to introduce the idea that it is not so much what things are made of, but that their form is important. The particular type of form he was interested in was mathematical. It is fitting that he introduced money that abstracts worth into a value and provides a common unit of measurement. In its abstraction of worth into numeric value, it habituates humans into dealing with numbers and, more generally, promotes the sort of quantitative analysis that is prerequisite for deeper mathematical thought. This deeper mathematical thought acquires a position in daily life because of money. The language of number becomes as common as other forms of language. Money makes humans into precise bean counters, then geometricians, and then urban engineers. Modern probability theory came about in the eighteenth century as a result of attempts to solve gambling problems. Considerable mathematical ingenuity has been exercised on problems wherein the entities under consideration were dollars. Money, in addition to providing motivation toward knowing elementary mathematics, comes also to mediate the environment that builds the paths society walks. Banks and depositories were created just on the basis for lending and storing money. Stocks are based on the idea of investing money. One cannot picture today’s society without the use of money. McLuhan feels that a mechanized culture needs money for coordination and communication between different specialist functions. Work, time, and money become interrelated, but separate. He remarks that money “separates work from other social functions.”...
