mark shroyer, dot com: this is where I keep my things

Site Navigation


Martin Kleppmann: Accounting for Computer Scientists

March 7, 2011 – 10:43 pm

I just found a great blog post by Martin Kleppmann titled Accounting for Computer Scientists, a succinct introduction to double-entry accounting (although he doesn’t refer to it as such) in terms of basic graph theory:

Eventually I figured it out: basic accounting is just graph theory. The traditional ways of representing financial information hide that structure astonishingly well, but once I had figured out that it was just a graph, it suddenly all made sense.

He goes on to illustrate how a profit-and-loss statement and a balance sheet can be visualized on a simple DAG.  Good stuff…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 reply

One Response to Martin Kleppmann: Accounting for Computer Scientists

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>