[jacobolus]

> The Greeks were really into geometry using the compass and straight edge so they actually did a lot of math without really needing numbers at all. They viewed calculation as less worthy of mathematicians and my understanding is that we don't have a lot of evidence for how merchants and engineers did basic calculations since most of the great Greek math texts ignored it.

Greek society was awash with arithmetical calculations. It wasn’t written about probably mostly because it was considered so obvious and commonplace. (Though it’s also a bit hard to say quite what was written about, since we’ve lost the vast majority of the books from the time.)

http://worrydream.com/refs/Netz%20-%20Counter%20Culture%20-%...

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> Did the Greeks (and the Romans) not develop algebra or use Arabic numerals because they weren't that into numbers as compared to geometry?

Algebra and arabic numerals really took off with the introduction of cheap paper and printed books.

It’s really hard to transmit the oral culture of skilled use of a counting board via printed book (we might call it tacit knowledge), but you can pretty straight-forwardly print out a pen-and-paper arithmetic algorithm.