[Spoken]
Babylonians developed the first written numerical system back in 34 hundred BC
Their system was base 60 which we still use today for telling time, but for everything else we ditched that in favour of
The base 10 system, which the Egyptians came up with a few hundred years later;
And this was rounded out by a notation for zero, courtesy of the Mayans a couple of hundred years after that -
Giving us the numbers 0 through 9, upon which is built our entire mathematical architecture
Now-
Before this
It's not like humans didn't have a concept of numbers
Any more than we didn't have a concept of time before clocks were invented
We've understood natural numbers just fine since before recorded history
It's easy to understand, after all, that if you have one chicken and your neighbour has two, then they have more chickens than you
And it's just as easy to show someone that 1 plus 2 equals 3 Because we can see our chicken
We can see their two chickens
And then as if by magic - oh no! Now we have three bloodstained chickens
This is simple and observable mathematics
And we didn't need language to make sense of this
Beyond this though, things get abstract and theoretical really fucking fast
And I'm not even talking astrophysics here
Just getting into numbers larger than 60 or 100 poses serious problems in a world where you don't often have 60 or 100 of anything
And, inevitably, somewhere adrift in the abyss of history is the first human who faced the challenge of trying to describe the concept of one million to a poor friend who was, understandably, less interested in a number with no practical application than they were in society's state of the art advances in avoiding being eaten by fucking lions
Babylonians developed the first written numerical system back in 34 hundred BC
Their system was base 60 which we still use today for telling time, but for everything else we ditched that in favour of
The base 10 system, which the Egyptians came up with a few hundred years later;
And this was rounded out by a notation for zero, courtesy of the Mayans a couple of hundred years after that -
Giving us the numbers 0 through 9, upon which is built our entire mathematical architecture
Now-
Before this
It's not like humans didn't have a concept of numbers
Any more than we didn't have a concept of time before clocks were invented
We've understood natural numbers just fine since before recorded history
It's easy to understand, after all, that if you have one chicken and your neighbour has two, then they have more chickens than you
And it's just as easy to show someone that 1 plus 2 equals 3 Because we can see our chicken
We can see their two chickens
And then as if by magic - oh no! Now we have three bloodstained chickens
This is simple and observable mathematics
And we didn't need language to make sense of this
Beyond this though, things get abstract and theoretical really fucking fast
And I'm not even talking astrophysics here
Just getting into numbers larger than 60 or 100 poses serious problems in a world where you don't often have 60 or 100 of anything
And, inevitably, somewhere adrift in the abyss of history is the first human who faced the challenge of trying to describe the concept of one million to a poor friend who was, understandably, less interested in a number with no practical application than they were in society's state of the art advances in avoiding being eaten by fucking lions
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