Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A trillion. 1 followed by 12 zeros. It feels like a special number, doesn’t it? But isn’t Ben Thompson right when he says : “It is nothing but a number, no different than 999,999,999,999 for all practical purposes, but we humans are not practical creatures: we attach importance to all kinds of silly things, round numbers chief amongst them.” When I think of my daughter’s passage through the world of numbers (so far), I realize how quickly we assign special place to “round numbers”. Once upon a time, my daughter used to count like this: “twenty eight, twenty nine, twenty ten ”. Now at seven, much older and somehow a teeny tiny bit wiser, I realized her understanding of numbers has improved… and changed. The first time was when we bought a new car and I asked her to remember the new registration plate number. Inevitably, a random 4-digit number. Here’s how she responded: “4 digits? No way I can remember that. A 1-digit number? Now that’s easy to remember. A 2-digit number?...

When one of my colleagues in China resigned, he sent his personal mail id to keep in touch. It read something like this: xxx@163.com (I felt it was a bit weird that a site had only numbers on it but I didn’t give it any further thought). When I Google’d a bit though, I was surprised to find that it is, in fact, very common for Chinese sites to have only numbers! Christopher Beam gives many such examples : “For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.” This seems insane. Wouldn’t it be much harder, if not impossible, to remember so many numbers, I wondered? Why would anyone choose numbers instead of letters for their website? Beam found the answer, and it makes perfect sense once you hear it: “To a native English-speaker, remembering ...

Bring up the word “logarithmic” and I am guessing it brings back painful memories of highly complicated rules on how multiply or divide. To make matters worse, logarithms never seemed to get used in real life in an area that any of us cares about. Other than the Richter scale that is used to measure earthquakes, that is. And yet, counter-intuitively, it turns out that instinctively we humans are programmed to look at numbers logarithmically, not linearly! And how do we know this? The discovery happened when scientists examined how South American Munduruku Indians visualized numbers spread on a line. This seems like a no-brainer at first: after all, which one of us doesn’t think of numbers as being spread evenly across a number line (think of graphs, house numbers etc)? But stop and think a bit and you realize that’s only because of how we were taught at school. Now these Munduruku Indians, they don’t even have the concept of numbers. So the scientists devised an experiment where the...