What You Need To Know About Numbers - Part 2

July 8, 2010

Interview with Alex Bellos, author of the book Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math

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Mike Carruthers:
When you put your iPod on shuffle it’s supposed to play songs in a random order – but it doesn’t.

Alex Bellos:
True randomness you must have no idea about what’s going to come next on an iPod it’s all done by computer logarithm – so it’s fake randomness.

Alex Bellos, author of the book Here's Looking at Euclid...

You say you’re playing something by Led Zeppelin and then next song, something else by Led Zeppelin, you’re like, “Hey this isn’t random I’ve just heard something by Led Zeppelin”. But actually randomness causes clusters. So people were complaining so Steve Jobs changed the program within the iPod to make it less random but to feel more random.

Because people really wanted variety not true randomness. Now our number system is based on 10 simply because we have 10 fingers which makes it easy to learn.

But actually there’s no mathematical reason to why we only have 10 numbers and actually there’s a good mathematical reason why we should produce 2 new numbers so we actually have 12 digits.

Of course that will never happen but think about it…

It’s much easier to divide things up if you have 12 of something. Because the numbers that divide into 12 are; 1,2,3,4, and 6 which is much more than what divides into 10, which is just 1, 2 and 5. The equivalent of a third would be 40% and a quarter would be 30% so that’s much nicer than a third being 33.333 recurring % and a quarter being 25%.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here