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Laplace took an interest in "the ebb and flow of the sea," as he put it. After examining the approaches taken by his predecessors, he grasped the impact of the Earth's rotation and studied the tides, paving the way for their times to be calculated accurately.
The revolutionaries introduced the decimal system for weights and measures, and despite a few Anglo-Saxon holdouts, it prevailed across the globe. Yet bases 12 and 60 live on, notably in the measurement of angles and the passage of time…
Set a cork adrift on the surface of a river. When its path is too difficult to calculate, approximation methods are the only option. Sometimes, however, the way the water flows makes the reliability of such methods problematic.
