This week in discovering mathematics we looked at number systems and place value. When I was in primary school I found it very difficult wrapping my head around place value I just kind of accepted that when you move up the number system you just add a zero instead of actually thinking about how you’re actually exchanging it for another number. Going into this week’s lectures I was nervous that I wouldn’t fully understand how number systems or place value works but I was surprised to find that it wasn’t as difficult as I thought.

We started off by looking at what are numbers and numerals (which I didn’t actually realise were two different things). Numbers are a mathematical object used to count, measure and label (Number, 2017) whilst numerals are symbols which are used to represent a number. After briefing looking at the question of can animals count (I was quite surprised to hear that there is a chimpanzee out there that can remember number patterns better than I ever could) we looked at several different number systems.

Today we use a 10 base number system which also corresponds with our metric system. However some tribes use different systems. For example the ancient Mayans use a base 20 number system which is represented by dots and dashes (Number systems, no date). Or the ancient Greeks who created a system where the 27 symbols used to represent their alphabet also represented different numbers (Number systems, no date). After looking at the binary system (that one really confused me) we created our own number system.

We decided that our number system would be a base 10 system as it was the one that we understood that best. We decided that the symbols that represented our numbers would be leaves (hence the bad pun used as my post title) and the number of points on the leaf represented what the number was. For example the leaf that represented the number 4 had four points. After trying out some simple questions using our base 10 number system we decided that it worked quite well.

However there are some people that believe that our base 10 number system isn’t the most efficient number system. Some people believe that a base 12 system has more advantages over base 10 (most of which only confused me further). For example “The dozen, and the dozen dozen, or gross, have shown their usefulness in packing and packaging over many, many years” (dozenal society, 2016). However changing our number system now would create great confusion for people wh
o are so used to the base 10 system.

Going forward in being a student teacher I think these lessons on number systems and place value would be very useful to pupils learning about number and place value. As a pupil who was very confused about these things when I was younger looking at the reasons at why we use our system and the history of it and other systems would be very beneficial.

References

Dozenal Society (2016) available at: http://www.dozenalsociety.org.uk/ (accessed: 7th October 2017)

Holme, R (2017) ‘Origin of Number Systems 2017 MyDundee’ [PowerPoint presentation] ED21006: Discovering Mathematics (year 2) (17/18). Available at: https://my.dundee.ac.uk/webapps/portal/execute/tabs/tabAction?tab_tab_group_id=_2093_1  (accessed: 7th October 2017)

Holme, R (2017) ‘Place value MyDundee’ [PowerPoint presentation] ED21006: Discovering Mathematics (year 2) (17/18). Available at: https://my.dundee.ac.uk/webapps/portal/execute/tabs/tabAction?tab_tab_group_id=_2093_1  (accessed: 7th October 2017)

‘Numbers’ (2017) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number (accessed: 7^th October 2017)

Number systems (no date) available at: http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#mayan (accessed: 7th October 2017)