An interesting email dropped into my mailbox last week. This email, which has clearly been doing the rounds since last year, was headed Naming of very large numbers. I quote: “The Indians of the Sub-continent gave the Zero to the World. … We, the descendants of the 1860 indentured labourers from the Indian Subcontinent, would like to make a small contribution to the science of the naming of very large numbers, … viz, million, billion, trillion etc, because they are not logical and misleading.”
The authors note that the present names do not correspond with the Latin. For example, the Latin prefix Bi should be associated with the number 2 while “Billion” has three sets of three zeros, not two. “Trillion” has four zeroes instead of three. And so on. The authors propose instead a new naming convention: Mille – 1 000, Bille – 1 000 000, Trille – 1000 000 000, Quadrille – 1000 000 000 000, Quintille –1000 000 000 000 000, and so on.
I gave an outward chuckle of pleasure reading this because I am always appreciative of people who take a look at how we have been doing things, and whether we could do those things better. This naming system makes much more sense that what we currently use, except…
Firstly, the concept of “Billion” depends on whether you are talking American or British — an American billion is one thousand millions, a British billion is one million millions. Ditto for trillions, quadrillions, etc.
Then there are cultures that count in hundreds rather than thousands — India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh use the following numbering system:lakh – 100 000, crore – 1001 lakhs, arab – 100 crore, kharab – 100 arab, neel – 100 kharab, padma – 100 neel all the way up to adant singhar which is 10 to the power of 41.
The French, who have always had a propensity for being strange, do weird things sooner. Numbers 1-16 are un, deux, trois,quatre … up to seize. The number 17 however is dix-sept – literally “ten-seven”, 18 is dix-huit – “ten-eight”, 19 isdix-neuf – “ten-nine”. It becomes normal again for 20 which is vingt, 30 – trente, 40 – quarante, 50 – cinquante, and 60 – soixante. But then 70 is soixante-dix – literally “sixty-ten”, 80 is quatre-vingts – literally “four twenties”, and 90 is quatre-vingt-dix – “four twenties and ten”.
(English has a similar construct with the word score meaning “twenty” as evinced by Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But I digress…)
Few of us stop to consider why we count in tens in the first place. The answer is probably at our fingertips – we first count on our fingers, and an entire system of doing things flows from that.
But counting in base 10 is cumbersome compared to counting in other bases. Computers calculate in binary which is base 2. There are only two numbers to be concerned with – 0 and 1. Every other number derives from these. Briefly, 0 is 0, 1 is 1, 2 is 10, 3 is 11, 4 is 100, 5 is 101, 6 is 110, 7 is 111, and 8 is 1000. (As computers have evolved, we have used increasing exponents of two as the calculation space: 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, and now 64 bit. But I digress again…)
Now you might think that this is cumbersome, but in fact, binary allows you to do a lot more with your fingers than count to ten. Picture this: Your first finger represents 1, second finger – 2, third finger – 4, fourth finger – 8, fifth finger – 16, sixth finger 32, seventh finger – 64, eighth finger – 128, ninth finger –256, and tenth finger – 512. Holding up all ten fingers adds up all of those numbers and totals 1023. In other words, you can represent any number between 0 and 1023 on your fingers.
So to my fellow descendants of the Indian sub-continent: I truly appreciate the thought and effort. But there are a number of studies which provide compelling evidence that teaching children to count in binary on their fingers makes them far more adept at complex calculations. So I believe we as a species would be far better served changing the way we count than what we call our numbers.
- 1. The print edition referred to crores as 10 lakhs instead of 100 lakhs. This was my error.