rotates him

saw this getting shared around other sites and I thought it was interesting enough to bring over here:

Inuit children invented their own system for writing numbers which makes arithmetic easier. Now its in Unicode

I think it's interesting to at least... consciously think about things so ingrained like base-10 thinking (the entire SI system is built on it!) and arabic numerals that there's really ever little talk about their merits/shortfalls.

In particular a thing I think is really interesting about the numeric symbols presented here is that as the article points out, simple mathematical operations become almost a form of geometric pattern matching.

I doubt the impact on say, higher mathematics would be significant one way or another, but most people only really engage with simple arithmetic on a casual day to day basis and I can see how an approach to numeric symbols like this could be practical and useful! In particular I sort of casually wonder if there would be any benefits to dysnumeric people to visualize numbers and operations in a form like this?

I love this number system it's so satisfying to use and works so much better for my brain

i love the term "non-euclidean space." you know that one math guy from 300 bc? this space would blow his tits clean off

Maybe not him, but that's definitely what happened to every mathematician afterwards

Because what Euclid did in his Elements book, he said:

"listen, these ten books i've written about geometry, all of this only works if a triangle's angles add up to 180 degrees. that's a requirement. i don't know what happens in other cases and i don't care"

(Actually his postulate is a little more complex but it directly implies the triangle fact above)

And people for centuries afterwards were like

"what do you mean Euclid of course a triangle's angles add up to 180 degrees all you need to prove it is .... uh [scribbling grows increasingly more frantic]"

It took two millenia of mathematicians repeatedly discovering spherical geometry and going "no this is nonsense. this is satan worship" before geometry got so detached from reality that someone was willing to go "sure, if you bend space just like this you can draw a triangle with three square angles"

Because I just read it as "it was kinda curvy, but like... With bad vibes"

(Also "Cyclopean", which is just "big, but also evil"... Maybe Lovecraft just fucking hated Greek)

But I think the cyclopean bit here just means made of rocks