Why These Are The Best Numbers!

The Kaktovik Iñupiaq numerals are great.

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Thanks for watching everyone. It means a lot. :)

[ST]

I'd be lying if this felt as simple as portrayed here.

[TheDIrtyHobo]

I think anyone who's really had to learn to use an abacus would recognize this system immediately. It even mirrors the top strokes counting by 5s and bottom by 1s. Interesting to see a group of Inupiat high schoolers independently (I assume) invent it, though.

[nef]

This is amazing. My only criticism would be the readability of the numerals, they all look the same and it might be hard to tell which numbers are which at a quick glance.

Edit: a lot of you seem to be taking the Arabic numerals' readability for.granted. there are similarities between certain arabic numerals, but under this system, there are groups of numbers where the only difference between them is a single space between strokes, or an extra slash in the fives above. 42 and 4, for instance, could be very difficult to distinguish depending upon a person's handwriting. Or 9, 14, and 19:, depending how visible someone's 5 markings are. Now imagine having these difficulties in larger numbers where the markings might be tightly packed together.

I understand that a lifelong user would have little trouble distinguishing numbers for themselves, but they would have more trouble than a native user of arabic numbers using arabic numbers. if this system is actually used for a really long time moving forward, it'll probable evolve through peoples handwriting to have more distinguishable glyphs. Some strokes might be shortened or curved, there are actually a ton of things you could do to improve readability without sacrificing the abilities described in the video above.

EDIT 2: not to mention the nightmare that would be writing the 5 marks in an exponent or something.

[bevansyura]

Teacher : "are you cheating the test?"
Kid : "just doodling around"

[SamiTheAnxiousBean]

this video:
*learn to count enchanting table numbers*

[nemesisfirst]

Problem of "5" and "10" is that if it's alone (And turned), you could missmatch & read them as "1" and "2" respectively.

I'm used to the japanese system, and, in their system, they cant make any mistake, like in our arabo-indian system.
EDIT : I remembered that 6 & 9 could be also missmatched in our system, reason why we used to put a point or a line underthem when they are alone.

[Straigo]

Reminds me of the D’ni Numeral System. A 25 base system, that has a 5 sub-base. It rotated the first 5 symbols 90° to represent five times their value. I had always assumed a number Base system need to be a perfect square in order to have a sub-base. This is really cool to see. I’ve always want to compose a 36 Base system, with a sub-base of 6, as 36 is both a perfect square and a highly composite number (sort of the opposite of a prime).

[jipsels]

This must be how americans feel about the metric system.

[atomic_wait]

A bunch of kids came up with this?


“Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.”

[maragazh]

This is nice in a modern world where we aren't writing out every character, the number of lines you need to write some of these numbers gets a little large, 7 strokes for 19. However, even for digital things, 20 numbers on a keyboard gets a wee bit big.

[pentelegomenon]

I was testing this thing out, and one thing I started doing when I was adding numbers together, I just smushed all the lines together into incorrect configurations and sorted them into correct configurations afterwards (for example, 17 is two vertical and three horizontal, so for 17 + 17 I would draw four vertical and six horizontal, then I would sort the six horizontal into a two horizontal and make a new digit).

[Photon]

Math Professor: "Divide this by thi-Why are you drawing lines?"


Me: "You won't understand..."

[HoneydewBeach]

Conlang Critic when he realizes the numbers arent base 6: *Impossible*

[-ElysianEcho-]

Wow that’s actually so well made, clearly a lot of thought went into it, while also keeping it super simple, sure it’s a bit disorienting to try to learn a new number system, but still

[HypernovaBolts]

I feel an under-appreciated part of this visual simplicity is that you could reasonably show someone who's never worked with these numerals before a middle-schooler's math homework, and that person would have a VERY easy time at, if not totally reverse-engineering which numerals mean what numbers, at least developing a functional capacity to work with them.

[UnitaryV]

This would be perfect for base 16. Instead of a sub base of 5, you could use a sub base of 4. Then, there'd be up to three strokes on both the bottom and the top. Just imagine how much easier this would make working in hexidecimal for coding.

[donaldhobson]

This is misleading, you chose numbers that made it easy. If you pick random numbers, your divisions will usually be messier.

[Mikey-jvfv]

Oh my good if numbers in English were like this math would be a completely different ball game for me! The way you explained division was so intuitive and I remember struggling so hard with that when I was first learning it. Really cool!

[flamingpi]

Imagine if we could take that system using a base 12 system, then split it up into four sub bases of three.

[kennyholmes]

This is pretty much how Cuneiform did their base 60.