Terence Tao

In the case of scientists, it's physical data.

And they want some nice theory or explanation to compress all that data into something that they can understand.

And somehow when you compress either theoretical data or experimental data, it often tends to compress to similar looking theories, even if they come from completely different origins.

Next question.

Let's move on.

Well, I think like the Babylonians, I mean, every time you have to do either very big numbers or very small numbers, you know, there's a limit to, you can give every single number a different name, but that really doesn't scale.

Every single numeral a different name.

Right, right, right, right.

So the Babylonians had a base 60 system, for example.

You know, the reason why an hour has 60 minutes and a minute has 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians.

So you get to 60 and then you start counting again.

The way base systems work is that if you have a really, really big number, you try to break it up into tens, or in the case of Babylonians, 60s.

So if you have 1,000 minutes, you want to describe 1,000 minutes, you break it up into hours, and it would be like 16 hours or something, plus some change.

So actually, humans have used multiple base systems.

The Babylonians had base 60.

Base 12, there's still remnants of base 12.

We talk about dozens and groupings.

LaGrosse, LaGrosse is very archaic now.

We use base 20 score, four score and seven years ago.

It's a base 20 system.