algorist

Noun

algorist (plural algorists)

1. One who uses Arabic numerals to represent numbers and to perform calculations, as opposed to one who uses Roman numerals to represent numbers and an abacus to perform calculations.
   • In the handling of numbers the dream of the algorist was to free men from a machine.1953, Burdette Ross Buckingham, Elementary Arithmetic: Its Meaning and Practice, page 344
   • Navigators, astronomers, scientists, mathematicians, and others who were involved in a great deal of calculating were rather readily converted to the algorist inclination.1977, Cynthia Conwell Cook, Western mathematics comes of age, page 55

   Antonyms:

   abacist

2. One who develops algorithms.
   • As an algorist Ramanujan had few peers in the world of mathematics.1987, Mathematical Education - Volume 4, page 64
   • It was in Lyons where Nicholas Chuquet, a master algorist, worked and by 1484 completed a series of manuscripts referred to as the Triparty.2000, Geoffrey Poitras, The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478-1776
3. The aspect of a biological organism that follows a systematic process to interpret perceptual data.
   • What we witness in Trevarthan's and Halliday's behavioral and protolinguistic analyses of infant line, is the infant as algorist possessing and deploying a stock of fundamental strategies or modes for selectively operating upon the world.1976, Haskins Laboratories, Status Report on Speech Research
   • The first issue is whether or not an agent or algorist is extraneous to a theory that can, in principle or fact, accurately and completely describe both the algorithms (in this case, the rules and procedures specifying how a biological machine detects information) and the data (invariant energy...1981, Claire F. Michaels, Claudia Carello, Direct perception, page 75