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I walked into a Standard Mathematics Room, where I met Ms.Kate, from Alaska. She is a new teacher, very inspirational actually. At the very first days of her classes, she said she will be assigning us an assignment soon that will be short, either research-supported, or not, paragraphs. Some days afterwards she did assign us.

What do you think about Math? I want to share this to you as well. First we need to answer what is invented. "Invented" is man-made, anthropogenic thing that hadn't been existed before the rise of mankind. "Discovered" is something that existed long ago before human, or start to appear naturally, and a human just first saw it before anyone in history, and said, "I discovered".

Math is very broad. If you study upper-level maths, you will now know that math is all related, and the more complicated field of math that has to do more with reality is Physics. Laws of Physics exist obviously before humans. If we take a close look, we can see, no matter how we look at this, gravity, one of the things stated by maths, and physics appeared before humankind. Things fall, as they attract each other together. Earth attract water to its surface, and this powerful force of the laws of physics holds the earth together before we existed. Well, well but does that mean math is discovered?

Here, let's think about this. I have been wondering, since when I was a kid, "Why do we have to count one-to-ten before start counting another figure like eleven, and twelve, before it is ten time more than its previous figure, or in a simpler explanations, when that new figure reached ten, like 99, then we need to add another figure, and it will become 100, and so on. This way of counting is called decimal number, as deci- prefix means "ten", like decades meaning a course of ten years, decimal numbers is a ten-based numbers that when we reach ten. We start a new figure, either adding more zero, expanding its value, or putting more zero behind the dots, making the number shrink. Why don't we have twelve-figure base, for example, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,æ,ß, then 10. We can do that but we don't because humans has ten finger. For me, the way we count the math is invented but the ways maths work were discovered, and existed before humankind. The laws of physics will be very different if we have number of different base.

What do you think?

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Comment by Gumbo123 on August 17, 2015 at 2:40am

BINARY COUNTING:

It also takes a lot longer to count because of how you actually say the numbers

How fast can nearly anyone you know over the age of 5 years old count to TEN

Say it out loud:  one  two  three  four  five  six  seven  eight  nine  ten

Now try it in binary:

1             =  one

10           = one zero

11            = one one

100         = one zero zero

101          = one zero one

110          = one one zero

111           = one one one

1000       = one zero zero zero

1001        = one zero zero one

1010        = one zero one zero


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Comment by Gumbo123 on August 17, 2015 at 2:30am

Ten fingers on two hands, the possible starting point of the decimal counting.

While the decimal system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal ) based on 10 digits is the most common used, it's not the only in even current usage.  Nearly all modern computers language is based a BINARY numeral system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number ), which would be recognize only 2 "real" numbers (0 and 1).  That makes it fairly quick to count to ONE MILLION on the binary scale, right?

1

10

11

100

101

110

111

1000

1001

1010

1011

1100

1101

1110

1111

10000

10001

10010

10011

10100

10101

10110

10111

11000

11001

11010

11011

11100

11101

11110

11111

100000

100001

100010

100100

100101

100110

100111

101000

101001

101010

101011

101100

101101

101010

101100

101110

101111

110000

110001

110010

110011

110100

110101

110110

110111

111000

111001

111010

111011

111100

111101

111110

111111

1000000

Except, it's not really one thousand, is it? You've still only counted SIXTY-FIVE (65) items . . . the count number 65 (as we commonly know it) only looks like 1,000,000 (note, binary doesn't use the comma) because you only have two didgits to work with.  It still takes one million ticks to count to one million.

Think about the old riddle, "Which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?"  They both weigh one pound, but the feathers take up much more space than the lead.

Same here!  the number ONE MILLION expressed in a binary number system would take you much longer to express, being illustrated as . . .

11110100001001000000_2

Other numbering systems?

Cardinal one million
Ordinal 1000000th (one millionth)
Factorization 26× 56
Roman numeral M
Binary 111101000010010000002
Ternary 12122102020013
Quaternary 33100210004
Quinary 2240000005
Senary 332333446
Octal 36411008
Duodecimal 40285412
Hexadecimal F424016
Vigesimal 6500020
Base 36 LFLS36

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