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An Introduction to STEM Programming with Python — 2019-09-03a Page 17
Chapter 2 — Numbering Systems
8 3
9 7 4 2
Free 6 5 1
10
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Illustration 6: Counting On Your
Fingers
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Counting on our fingers, comes naturally to most of us. Early counting was done making marks with a
stick in the dirt or a pencil on a piece of paper. It is easier to make groupings of marks into “scores”
like:
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Illustration 7:
Counting to Eight the Free
Hard Way
Imagine for a moment if humans were born with 8 or 12 fingers, how different would counting have
been? eBook
To express numbers greater than the number of fingers we have, people developed the positional
notation. It allows us to write large numbers by creating places for tens, hundreds, thousands, and
larger powers of 10 (Positional Notation, 2016).
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In this discussion we will write the numeric base of a number as a subscript after a number or with a
prefix so that we can always be sure of how to interpret the number. Numbers that does not have
markings (either before or after) it can be assumed to be base 10.
Copyright 2019 — James M. Reneau Ph.D. — http://www.syw2l.org — This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
