Terence Tao

The French still use base 20 in their number system.

Yeah, and computers use base two.

So, you know, binary is zero and one.

I think it can slow it down or speed up a little bit, but you're still accessing the same numbers.

So, you know, like it's always true that A plus B is B plus A, regardless of whether you use base 10 or base 12.

or base 20 or whatever.

So once computers came along, people did experiment.

There was a base three system that the Soviets tried.

It didn't work very well.

We found that binary works really, really well for computers.

And so, yeah, once we had to do computation at massive scale, we found the best base was base two.

But base 10 is completely fine for everyday purposes.

Right.

It is a tough problem, especially since there's a shortage of really qualified math teachers.

It's not a profession that is very appealing often.

They don't often get enough respect or salary for what they do.

My theory is that different people have a different kind of math language.

So some people are very visual learners and they like to see lots of pictures.

Some people are very narrative driven and they want to see a story.

Some actually like working with symbols and solving puzzles, some like playing games, some like being competitive.