December 2008
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
6h 26m
English
Humans have 10 fingers on their two hands. Thus, it is natural that our dominant number system is based on 10. (Others do exist. The Sumerians, for example, used a system based on 60!) But what does the decimal system really mean? Consider the number 25: 25 means 2 * 101 + 5 * 100 = 20 + 5.
Similarly, 125 = 1 * 102 + 2 * 101 + 5 * 10°. If we had a maximum of five slots in which to write a decimal number we might have the following representation:

We have unused slots in the 104 and 103 locations.
The biggest number we could write in this format would be
| 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
What about fractions? Places to ...
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