What do you call the way you count when you use sticks and slashes (example: llll is 4) ?

I've just always called it the "tally system"...i dunno if theres a more "technical" word for it.

JT,
Chicabird is right. It is called the Tally System used in frequency tables/graphs. This is a part of statistics and NOT any other section of mathematics.

In order to have a rough idea at first glance, the tally system is used; which is further used in plotting histograms, frequency tables, pie-charts etc.

Hope I've helped, cwm27.gif
Pin~Jinx

The specific kind of tally you describe is sometimes called "hatch marks."

Example:

"Enter Arabic numerals (rather than ranges or hatch marks) in all the supplied boxes on the forms which you submit." (http://macfadden.mit.edu:9500/statistics/sampleweekstats.html)

Typically hatch marks are parallel lines used to shade a drawing or part of a graph (intersecting ones are called crosshatches), as in "hatch 5: LINE; especially : one used to give the effect of shading" (Merriam-Webster Collegiate)


a few other examples of hatch marks


On a cross-cultural note:

In Japan (and I think also in China), they use a simple 5-stroke kanji character for tallying (it's the one on the left here and means "correct" or "ortho-"). This kanji is written in the order top horizontal stroke, central vertical stroke, middle horizontal, left vertical, bottom horizontal. So with tallies not equally divisible by 5, you get semi-formed, floating characters.

[This message was edited by referenth on 07-07-02 at 02:41 PM.]