7.0: Introduction

Wow, last chapter was about “counting," and this one is about “numbers." It sure seems like we’re regressing back to first grade or earlier. And indeed, this chapter will contain a repeat of some elementary school concepts! But this is so we can re-examine the foundations and generalize them somewhat. The mechanical processes you’ve always used with numbers — adding, subtracting, comparing, checking whether something divides evenly, working with place value — are all correct, but they’re all hard-coded for decimal numbers. The word “decimal," in this chapter, won’t mean “a number with a decimal point, like 5.62" but rather a number expressed in base 10. And what does “expressed in base 10" mean? It means that the digits, from right to left, represent a “one’s place," a “ten’s place," a “hundred’s place," and so on. This is what we all learned in grade school, and perhaps you thought that’s just how numbers “were." But it turns out that 1, 10, 100, 1000, \(\dots\), is just one choice of place values, and that we could equally as well choose many other things, like 1, 2, 4, 8, \(\dots\), or 1, 16, 256, 4096, \(\dots\), or even 1, 23, 529, 12,167, \(\dots\), as long as those values are of a certain type (successive powers of the base).

It’s the concept of bases, and specifically bases other than 10, that will cause us to rethink some things. It’ll feel unnatural at first, but soon you’ll discover that there are aspects of how you work with numbers that are unnecessarily specific, and that it’s freeing to treat them in a more general way.

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