ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Nicolas Chuquet

Nicolas Chuquet was a man who lived a very long time ago. He was born in France about 600 years ago, which is a very long time ago even for grown-ups!

Nicolas Chuquet was very smart and loved to work with numbers. In fact, he was so good with numbers that he became very famous for his work in mathematics. One thing that Nicolas Chuquet is known for is creating a very important math book called "Triparty en la science des nombres".

In this book, Nicolas Chuquet wrote about a new way of doing calculations called "positional notation". This way of doing math was different than what people were used to, and it made things a lot easier. It's kind of like when you learn how to count by tens or hundreds - it makes adding and subtracting much simpler!

Another interesting thing about Nicolas Chuquet is that he came up with a way of writing really big numbers using smaller numbers. For example, he could write the number one million using just a few symbols instead of writing out all the digits. This was a very helpful and important discovery in the world of math!

Even though Nicolas Chuquet lived a very long time ago, his ideas and discoveries are still important today. Math and numbers are all around us, and people like Nicolas Chuquet helped us understand them better.