[Actual response forthcoming but I skipped straight ahead to Cartesian coordinates/graphing in the interests of saving time/brainspace.
Now I wonder what Chinese and Japanese math had as the equivalent of graphing, if at all, but unfortunately I haven't read enough mathematics history to know that; and my one book on Japanese temple mathematics perished in the flood, although from browsing through it my impression was that it was a lot more straight-up geometry than analytical geometry.
There's one point in Revenant Gun I think where it's mentioned or implied in passing that matrices in the hexarchate use column operations rather than row operations as an outgrowth of the vertical orientation of the writing system. I don't know how realistic that is from a worldbuilding standpoint, but it doesn't seem any weirder than anything else in the story...]
Re: logarithms are very practical [ethnomathematics/history of math chitchat]
Now I wonder what Chinese and Japanese math had as the equivalent of graphing, if at all, but unfortunately I haven't read enough mathematics history to know that; and my one book on Japanese temple mathematics perished in the flood, although from browsing through it my impression was that it was a lot more straight-up geometry than analytical geometry.
There's one point in Revenant Gun I think where it's mentioned or implied in passing that matrices in the hexarchate use column operations rather than row operations as an outgrowth of the vertical orientation of the writing system. I don't know how realistic that is from a worldbuilding standpoint, but it doesn't seem any weirder than anything else in the story...]