Patrick,
Imagine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11!!!!!!!
Haha, true, but why would you count 11!!!!!!! after 9? there's quite a difference between there two. (had to get back on ya )
]]>That worked alright for them because they presumably kept their numbers smallish, but it wouldn't for us because once we get past 1000, we run out of numerals and have to just put a bunch of M's. So we use bases instead.
At first, people didn't use 0, and just left a gap where one should be.
6, 7, 8, 9, 1 , 11, 12, 13...
But this didn't work very well at all, because if you had a number like 1 2 , then no one has any idea what it's meant to be. 1020? 10020? 12? 10002? 1 and then 2? It could be anything.
And then some clever person had the idea of making up a 0 digit, and that seemed to work so we've used it ever since.
]]>Wonder how people counted before!
Counting things without the concept of 0 was never really a problem, I guess. Why on earth would you count nothing? Waste of time
]]>To get from gx to g(x+1), you need to take it to some kind of power. This could be squaring, cubing, or anything up to ^(x+1) if x+1 is prime. Of course, there are other times when the power is one, but overall that explains why it grows so quickly.
How did you work out g1000?
]]>1. The special quality of the number 64 : it is both a perfect square and a percet cube. The smallest such number parat from zero and one . Let's call it it g3 for convenience.
g4 is 4096
g5, g6 is 1152921504606846976
g10 is approiximately 7x10^758
g20 is 2.125219x10^10^70077344
g1000 is approximately 10^10^433
You can see how these numbers grow as the base value increases.
Interestingly, gx would always lie beteen x^x and x^x^x.
Nice post, thanks for providing the numbers
]]>g20 is 2.125219x10^10^70077344
g1000 is approximately 10^10^433