How To Take Over The World

How To Take Over The World

 

I was driving through Chinatown, stuck in a slooow traffic jam. I looked up, and saw a banner slung over the road. It read like this:

(Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese) 1999 - 2000 (Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese) 123-456-7890 (Chinese)(Chinese)

I could read none of the text, but I knew the years and I knew the phone number to call. Since then I’ve forgotten the years and the phone number, so the ones I listed above are made up. But I could read those numbers, while I couldn’t read the text.

          And why? Because Hindu-Arabic numbers have taken over the world. They are known in every society on Earth. And that’s good thing. Can you imagine trying to build a car or a computer or a spacecraft or even a flashlight by using Roman numerals? I can’t either; and that is how and why positional arithmetic took over the world.

          Key to the system is a new number, previously ignored: Zero. It means both ‘nothing’ and ‘multiply by ten’. It is the least of the numbers, yet it is vital for making numbers as big as you like.

          Here’s the cream of the jest: we don’t know who invented it! Some nobody from nowhere gives nothingness a name, and poof! We’re a new species! We can do arithmetic! So now we have phones and cars and computers and airplanes! We’ve taken pictures of the far side of the Moon!

          But we don’t know whom to thank for it!

          And that is how to take over the world.