How high can you count on your fingers? (Spoiler: much higher than 10) - James Tanton
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TEDEd Animation
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How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers -- or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands, which we use to count to ten. But is that really as high as we can go? James Tanton investigates.
If one can readily bend one’s fingers into four states – down, slightly down, slightly up, and up – what is the highest number you can represent with ten fingers in a base-4 positional notational system?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator James Tanton
- Director Lisa LaBracio
- Script Editor Alex Gendler
- Sound Designer Weston Fonger
- Animator Kaitlyn Carroll
- Narrator Addison Anderson
