Immediately, I remembered that the Mayans had the concept of zero. I don't know where I learned this or why I remember it, but there it is.
I didn't mention that in my answer. "The number zero lets you count nothing." Oh, goodness. Philosophy and numbers. Not my strong suit.
"But it's not a number."
"Well, it allows us to count what we don't have. What if someone asked you how many dogs we have?"
"We don't have a dog."
"Right. How do you count that? You don't say, 'We don't have one dog.' You say we have no, or zero, dogs."
"Does zero come before one? It's the first number?"
Oh, yeah, because there's no way I'm teaching negatives today . . . .
Get or make a simple abacus, sometimes known as a counting frame and you will have no more troubles until they start the binary system. You may have noticed that in Europe the electric switches are frequently marked 0 and 1, as you so brilliantly said 0 dog or 1 dog (power flow).
ReplyDeleteThere is no difficulty, firstly come to Europe (England) where the floor we live on is the GROUND FLOOR which is quite reasonable and when we rise up the stairs we get to floor 1 and then 2. Now return to the ground floor ie 0 and go down to the basement or minus 1. I am at a loss as to how you translate this back to USA but your cunning will find a way.
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