Archeological relics indicate that ancient craftsmen already knew mathematics. An example is the floral designs on pots made by the late Neolithic Halafian people, who lived between 6200 and 5500 BC in Mesopotamia, the Science News (SN) reported.

Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich examined thousands of Halafian pottery fragments unearthed since the 1930s and identified 375 with designs depicting flowers illustrated with four, eight, 16, 32, or 64 petals — a “geometric” progression that implies the designs were inspired by powers of two.

That knowledge antedates the base-60, or sexagesimal, math of the Sumerians, who lived in roughly the same region more than 1,500 years later, according to SN.

Meanwhile, the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) claims that the earliest computer was used by silk weavers during the Western Han dynasty, dating back more than two millennia.The bulky ENIAC, a 30-ton machine occupying 167 square meters of floor area and used in World War II to compute ballistic trajectories for the United States Army, hydrogen bomb calculations, and scientific research, is considered the first electronic computer.

According to CAST, four looms were found in a 150 BC tomb dug up in 2012 at the Laoguan Mountain site in Chengdu, southwestern China. The drawlooms function like a modern computer as they use physical pattern cards — the ancient equivalent of software — to direct the lifting of individual warp threads according to a preset design, the South China Morning Post reported.

Through the “pattern book,” or programmed design template analogous to modern punch cards, the drawloom is operated automatically to weave silk with intricate designs.

While there were other weaving machines at the time, they could only make basic patterns.

The technological logic of the Chengdu drawlooms profoundly influenced the foundational principles of modern information technology, Wang Yusheng, former director of the CAST Museum, said in an article for state-affiliated China Science Communication in 2024.