There is a part in Alice in Wonderland where her math is all gibberish - she says 9 + 9 = 10 or something like that; the crazy thing I just learned is that she was right - she's just using a base 18 decimal system.
Why do we use base 10? Some cultures have used base 12, the number of knuckles on the human hand, base 20, even base 60... in our decimal system, we have 10 named numbers and all others are a combination of those. 1-9, then 10 is really just (1 x 10) + 0. "10" isnt a number, it's a code.
In Alice's case the concept of 18 (9 + 9) is represented by "10", because in a base 18 system 10 is code for (1 x 18) + 0.
crazy.
I'm reading this book The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number which is a tangential romp through the history of numbers and I love it.
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Probably you don't want me checking in on this blog, but someone else referred me here - where'd you GET this brain? Keep it up, and add the link to the signature of your email - that's one way to get readers. Another way is to make comments on other people's blogs... they clickback and ... viola! Nice work, Conor.
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