It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

== Lesson One ==

I will write down a number for you with stars:
. . .
and here is another
. . . . . . .
but if I write my age,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
in dots it starts to be a little too much to take in.

Imagine trying to write a very large number down like how many days there are in a year. That would be quite a bit of dots!

reason:
In order to be able to represent numbers of all sizes conveniently we need a logarithmic system, that is, a system where the measuring units scale like 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10 000…

Now imagine instead of just dots we used two symbols . and x.
. means one
x means ten
so my age (26) would be xx……
the number of days in the year would be
xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx…..
it is starting to get long, but still this is pretty good compered to writing just the dots. :)

So clearly we are on the right track, and we must continue in this way! Next we invent the following new symbols
v for five
L for fifty
c for one hundred
D for five hundred
M for one thousand
Then the number of days in the year will be
cccLxv
and the year i was born in would be
MD

But what if we had some very large number we wanted to represent that is much greater than a thousand. Then we would need to add new symbols, and in this manner every time we have to
This of a really large number, like how many days have passed since the formation of the solar system?
You would have invent a new symbol for that for sure!

You could say here, that we don’t have such fancy numbers.
We have 129lbs, 12 eggs, 1000$ dollars and so on. But it is still pretty difficult to give names for very large numbers…. things like the age of the universe (if it is finite),
the number of grains of sand on the planet earth, or the number of cells in your body
(Not to mention Avogadro’s number, , etc…)

[edit] List of SI prefixes

The twenty SI prefixes are shown in the chart below.

But really wouldn’t it be simpler if we let the numbers speak for themselves?

Look at the last column in each case. Just by looking at that number you can tell how big it is? Can you? In most people it becomes automatic and we rarely think about it.

1 finger
how many more are there on both your hands
10

how many grams of fat in 100 grams of 1% milk ?
1

10
100
1000
these are the numbers that matter

or if we write the logarithm their sizes
1
2
3

… just count the number of zeros’ and you know how big the number is …