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I was just thinking about my childhood and came upon a strange memory.

I was probably around 3 years old and my father was picking me up from pre-school. We were on our way home and he was teaching me how numbers work. At this point I could count from zero to one-hundred without a problem, but from there on I was pretty much clueless. Every time I would get to one-hundred I would stutter a bit.

No matter, my father told me, you just repeat everything from the beginning, only with one-hundred placed before it. OK, this makes sense. So I proceeded, “one-hundred and one, one-hundred and two, one-hundred and three …”. I was getting the knack of this. Easy, no problem. However, once I got to one-hundred and ten I simply could not fathom that the next number in the series was simply one-hundred and eleven. Instead, I created a new number: Elevendy-hundred.

How I came upon such an idea is beyond me, but that is what my young mind reasoned to be the answer. Funny how that works.

To this day, whenever I see the number 111, I still think in my mind “elevendy-hundred”. Perhaps this explains why math was never my strong suit: I am far too individual to stick to the established rules of mathematics, I just make up my own.

This entry was posted on October 29, 2012 at 7:31 am and is filed under Random Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.