9/9/2023 0 Comments Inno world silicon valley![]() “When my mother made me a parka, she used her thumb and her middle finger to measure how many times she would be able to cut the material,” Pollock says. ![]() In traditional practices, the body also serves as a mathematical multitool. Iñuiññaq, the word for 20, represents a whole person. “In your one arm, you have tallimat fingers,” Pollock explains. For example, she says, tallimat-the Iñupiaq word for 5-comes from the word for arm: taliq. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,” says Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock, who taught with the Kaktovik numerals in Utqiagvik, a city 300 miles northwest of where they were invented. ![]() Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10 and 15, and then in sets of 20. The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. But other number systems exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”-values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. Today's numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers-creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere's first new numeral system in more than a century.
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