Serendipity Daily Thoughts

Welcome back to another piece of writing. I was writing about money for the last three days. For today’s writing, I would like to write about another important innovation made by human beings – numbers. Number is deeply related to money too, so I hope you will find my writing interesting.

We live in the world full of numbers. For an instance, this topic is the 5th one of the most important innovations made by human beings. Today is March 11th. The height of the Tokyo Skytree is 634m. These numbers, “5”, “11”, “634”, give people a clear idea of the subject – like if we see today’s topic is the 5th one, we can guess that there have been 4 topics discussed so far and the next writing is going to be the 6th one. Different from alphabets, numbers can be added or can represent the orders. (I would like to talk about four different types of numbers in the near future.) Therefore, number is a useful tool for counting and giving a particular meaning to an object.

One day I wondered why we were able to develop such a concept. Other species like dogs and cats do not seem to be able to count objects as humans do although it is definitely easier to understand the surrounding environment if they can count numbers.

Actually, human beings had a different counting system in the past. Since they only needed to count certain objects like the number of preys, they only used their fingers in hands and feet to count. As humans developed their ways to live, it was required for them to count bigger numbers, such as the number of group members and annual crop amounts. They started using certain symbol for certain numbers like 1, 5 and 10, and they counted objects just combining those characters. One of the most famous example of such a counting system is the Roman numbers, where “I” represents 1, “V” represents 5, and “X” represents 10. Therefore, 5, 11, 634 can be written as “V”, “XI”, and “DCXXXIV” (D = 500, C = 100). If we encounter the ancient documents in which roman numerals are used, we often see letters like “XXIV”, which is 24. However, the downside of this way to count number is that it is hard to express much larger numbers only using letters, because the figure gets longer and longer as the number increases.

Therefore, the more convenient system to count numbers, the current counting system has been replaced for the older systems. I would like to discuss the topic in the next section.

Thank you for reading today’s piece of writing. I hope we will see each other tomorrow. I am sorry that I was late to post this writing.

See you soon.