Secular Café: What's in a Number?

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

What's in a Number? Apr 8th 2012, 15:38 The first numbers that people ever used were the counting numbers, as they might be called. 1, 2, 3, 4, ... Numeral (linguistics). Some "primitive" people have not had words for numbers more than 1 or 2 or 3, because they had not needed to count very much. But agriculture made lots of counting a necessity, thus lots of number words. Having lots of separate number words can be a load on one's memory. The usual solution to this problem is a number-base system. The most common one is base ten. Count from one to ten, then the next numbers are ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, etc. After ten-nine, one gets ten and ten, which one can call two-ten. Continuing, one gets two-ten-one, two-ten-two, etc. When one gets to ten-ten, one could call it a superten. Etc. People have used a variety of number bases, notably 4, 5, 10, 12, 20, and 60, but the most commonly used one among the more technically advanced people is 10, with a few specialized survivals with base 60. One can use historical linguistics to find where and when some of the systems were invented, and in at least some cases, the inventors had Neolithic technology: Stone Age, but with lots of agriculture. Proto-Indo-European numerals, Numeral Systems of the World's Languages, Numbers in Over 5000 Languages ENIAC, the world's first all-electronic computer, had used base 10, but just about all others have used base 2, because that's what's easiest to design circuits for. One only has to distinguish between on and off, or different voltage values, or different magnetizations, or whatever. Digits 0 and 1 also get used to represent condition values: false and true.

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