Last week, in Number Sense 021, we took a quick look at place value, an invention that lets us represent very large numbers with only 10 different symbols (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Sometimes we use the comma when writing very large numbers, so I suppose we could say 11 different symbols. Still, that's a small number of symbols to be able to write numbers into the thousands, millions or billions.
This week I'd like us to take a look at what might happen if we had fewer symbols to use. We will take a look at base 4, that is, a number system that only has four symbols: 0, 1, 2 and 3.
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