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When Numbers and Words Collide
If we had unique words for ten thousand and a hundred thousand, for ten million and a hundred million, it might make understanding of really big numbers more intuitive.
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Posted by hector on 05/05 at 03:43 PM
Mike, why don't you offer two brazilian dollars as an incentive?
Posted by hector on 05/05 at 03:52 PM
Can we change mecillion and decillion to something else? They're taken:
http://googology.wikia.com/wiki/Mecillion
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/decillion
A decillion equals 10^33 (but not in the British system)
A mecillion equals 10^[3(10^33) + 3)]
I suppose if we can't come up with new terms (though I vote for Brazilian and Cotillion), we can solve Mike's problem by just eliminating ten and hundred.
Posted by Phil Wilson on 05/05 at 05:06 PM
Mike, the issue with which you begin you post is our understanding of big numbers. I don't think there are any shortcuts to this. Different countries, or rather, languages, break numbers down in different ways. The Japanese language, for example, works in powers of 10^4. But neither different words nor even writing out all of those zeroes would necessarily grant people better understanding of the numbers themselves. That comes through creative teaching, and that in turn instills creative thinking in people. For example, I like to draw a metre-long line of the whiteboard, and label the left-hand end 0 and the right-hand end 1 billion. I then ask a volunteer to quickly point to where their intuition tells them 1 million would be.
Of course, it is only 1 mm from 0 on this scale, and almost no-one (not even the professional scientists I work with) gets it right if they work so quickly that only their intuition is at work. The same demonstration works, of course for where a billion is in relation to 1 trillion.
As Richard Dawkins has observed, we evolved for "Middle Earth" - middle-sized objects moving at middle speeds in the middle distance.
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