Hello!
I'm a computer scientist and plan to prepare a exhibition about the history of numbers inside our university (ranging from counting with fingers to the expression of numbers in computers). However, I really would like to present the historical facts in a nice and interesting way. Of course, I can build up the exhibition like a simple timeline, but this might be a bit boring. So, I'm asking you guys: Are there any ways to present historical facts about numbers in a more sophisticated way?
You should organize it by tech. Remember that numbers are tools. You're going to end up talking about what they were for more than the maths. Navigation, architecture, calendars, all of those would develop at different rates in a civilization and have math supporting it.
Just as two examples:
The beginning of basic numbers as a system would have been merchants and people accounting for debt/business transactions. There were a lot of mechanisms for doing this in early civilization via the temples, tribes, or governments. For details on that you should check out Debt: The First 5000 Years.
Computers are a different branch that deal with information transmission. James Gleick's outstanding book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood is a concise history of how we go from drum codes in the Congo to the Difference Engine to Turing's computer language.
Museum exhibit design is a very fast-moving and dynamic field. I would recommend visiting nearby museums, large and small, to research how you can best structure your exhibits. Assuming you have access to an academic library you should be able to check out journals and books on the topic. Try and talk with colleagues with relevant experience also.
I can't recommend layouts since so much is dependent on your building(s) and target audience(s) but there's a lot more to this field than plonking displays in a room.
Source; did a course on artefacts and museums during my degree programme.
I would recommend reading Luke Hodgkin's A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity. It's an overview of the history of mathematics from the Babylonians to the beginnings of modern computer science. You should be able to create some interactive exhibits from the materials in the book. For example, demonstrating the process of number writing on Babylonian mathematical tablets and how scribes used the base 60 cuneiform numbers (pages 14-30). Or a hands-on exhibit on Chinese counting rods as a tool for manipulating numbers and how it introduces the idea of negative numbers (pages 85-88).
hi! this question might be worth x-posting to /r/AskScience for their ideas