h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It'd be a lot more efficient to use base two... then we could count up to 1023 on our fingers, and to well over a million if we used our toes as well...

I imagine that teaching kids to do this would help them acquire basic mathematical abilities, too.

Daft, daft, daft.

26199

I suppose its historical, 'cause its so easy to count on one's fingers. Most things like that don't have much logic behind them, but base 12 is good, 'cause things like 1/3 wouldn't be the base 12 equivalent of a recurring decimal.

Ahh, but counting in binary on your fingers ain't *that* hard. And being able to count up to 1023 has got to be useful...

Although, I have to admit, I've never really bothered doing this myself, after all, a decent calculator is so much more use...

*shrug*

26199

Yes, but to whoever started counting however many millenia ago, they probably didn't need 1023. Why should being able to count to 1023 be useful? When was the last time you wanted to count any items above 100, say?

Hmmm. 'S a good point, of course.

*grin* I suppose it wasn't really necessary until the advent of the teaching of arithmetic, and by the point it was too late to change the habit of generations...

26199

Are you planning for us to do complicated arithmatic on our fingers in base 2?

Base two might not be best... if you really thought about it, y'could probably come up with a *really* efficient way of representing numbers on one's fingers.

And it might be a good thing. Did y'know that (from what I've heard) Chinese (I think it was Chinese) kids pick up arithmetic easier because they have a more logical numbering system? They use ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, etc...

So learning to use a logical system on yer fingers might well be useful.

*shrug*

26199

But then you get into the whole question of "I can do arithmatic very fast; does this make me good at maths?"

Some people hold up education systems where people are taught to do fast arithmatic from a young age. But I read in Richard Feynman's autobiography that these people aren't actually thinking about the problem, so if they get given some complicated one because they are doing it with an algorithm, so to speak, rather than actually *thinking* about it, they can take longer.

I must learn this *shrug* thing

Joanna

Base 16 is good because 16 is a power of 2. (Actually it's 2^4 which is 2^2^2.) This means that it can easily be converted to base 2 for computing applications, but doesn't take as much space to write on the page (which is the problem with using low bases: a numbering system in which twenty is written as 10100 is not practical).

TRiG.

Of the poit slightly-

Is it true the NSA of America are issuing a reward for the largest prime number?

Wattaray Bro

Doubt it. You can keep finding higher primes if you keep looking. They won't run out. They just get harder to find.

TRiG.

I don't think the Base ten system is ever going to change, especially now the metric system is so popular. It would take so long to change it everywhere too

Thanx for the info re Prime no. The NSA are offering a reward - but I think it's virtualy impossible to get, cos there will always be a higher one.

Wattaray -131-

Hmm, I wrote a paper once on that for Uni, maybe I should turn it into an entry...

It's not everyone that uses base ten. There are plenty of cultures left where base 12 is the norm, and the Babylonians used base 60 cobined with 12 and 360, which is why we still have a 360° circle...

And of course 6x9=42 - in base 13