Numbers for the Millions

All is number, taught the ancient Pythagoreans. Yet their store of numbers was exceedingly sparse in comparison with the grotesque dance of figures which surrounds us in our present everyday existence. We count and are being counted in huge numbers; we live by social security numbers, zip numbers, account numbers, telephone numbers, mom numbers and house numbers. Every day sees an influx of bills and checks and charges and balances. The official budgets unhesitatingly run into billions, and reams of statistics are an accepted form of argument. These figures are whirled around in computers which analyze the principles of big business, follow the trajectories of satellites, and explore the interior of atomic nuclei at the rate of so and so many operations per nanosecond (one billionth of a second).

All of this has developed along a continuous path from the first attempts by man to systematize his numbers as soon as they became too large to be counted on the fingers. Various methods have been in use to group numbers; most of them have fallen by the wayside when they have proved inferior in competition with other systems. Our present decadic or decimal system, based on groupings by tens, is by now, fortunately, quite universally accepted; in several respects it appears to be a fortuitous convenient middle way for our dealings with numbers.