[lamerose]

The article makes this sound a bit like a lamer, English version of the Antikythera mechanism. In reality it's just a quadrant, i.e., a portable sundial relying on gravity for alignment, and it's only a decade older than the next oldest specimen.

[trompetenaccoun]

That's just one side. On the other it has a dial for calculating the Easter date.

[NeoTar]

I sometimes wonder if advanced mathematics in Western Europe would have a survived without the need to calculate the date of Easter!

[082349872349872]

A colleague of mine started his career as a computer scientist in the then-Soviet Union. He was reading western papers that were using Easter calculation as an example of a non-trivial computation that "everyone knows", and wound up traveling all the way to a big library in Moscow before he found a book that gave him an independent source of the details.