Counting to Abstraction - Evolution of Number !!
Yesterday, we were watching the film The Martian. Not the first time. Each time one gets caught in the magnificence of Mars, its harsh conditions and how the protagonist leverages his engineering and botany skills to survive. But what caught my attention this time was his attempts to communicate and, in the process, his use of hexadecimals. And it got me thinking. You ever stop to think about how wild it is that we can just... write down a negative number? Or use hexadecimal to communicate? We take it for granted now. But there is something deeper going on here. From not being able to count, to creating number systems with base 10, base 2, base 16, base 8, to negative numbers, to irrational numbers, to complex numbers... we have come a long way... more than just the mathematical evolution... rather about how human consciousness itself has expanded over the centuries. Think about it. Each breakthrough probably felt radical at the time. Moving from concrete counting... five fingers, five...