Counting to 10

Take a peek at your own two hands. Go ahead, wiggle all your fingers. Now, think about your feet, tucked inside your shoes. Can you wiggle all ten of your toes. I am right there with you. I am the number of fingers you have, and the number of toes, too. You see me everywhere. I am the number of shiny pins waiting at the end of a bowling alley, the number of legs on a speedy crab scuttling across the sand, and the number of players on a basketball team running down the court. I help you make sure everyone gets a fair share of cookies and I help you keep track of all your favorite toys. Have you guessed who I am. I am the amazing, ancient, and incredibly useful idea of Counting to 10.

I am one of the oldest ideas in the whole world. Can you imagine a time before writing, before schools, even before farming. That’s when I was born. My first home was on people’s hands. Way back around 20,000 BCE, early humans needed a way to remember important things. How many deer did they see. How many days until the full moon. They didn’t have paper or pencils, so they used what they had, their ten fingers. When they ran out of fingers, they needed another way. Archaeologists have found ancient bones, like the famous Ishango Bone from Africa, with special marks carved into them. Each notch was a number, a way of keeping track. It was the very beginning of using me to make sense of the world. One finger, one notch, one number at a time, I helped people organize their thoughts and share information.

For thousands of years, people carried me around in their heads or on notched bones. But eventually, they needed a way to write me down so they could share me more easily. The ancient Egyptians, around 3000 BCE, came up with a brilliant way to do this using their picture-writing called hieroglyphs. To show the number 'one,' they simply drew a single straight line. For me, the number 'ten,' they drew a picture of a cattle hobble, which looked like an arch. It was a good start, but the biggest step forward came much later. Around the 6th century CE, clever mathematicians in India invented the symbols we use today: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. But they also invented something that changed everything, the number zero. This little circle made it so much easier to write big numbers and do math. These amazing numerals traveled from India to the Arab world, where scholars studied them, and then they journeyed all the way to Europe. That’s why we call them Hindu-Arabic numerals today.

From those first finger-counts to the numbers on your screen right now, I have been on an incredible journey. And the best part is, I am the foundation for almost all math. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, it all starts with me. I help engineers build towering skyscrapers and enormous bridges. I help programmers write the code for your favorite video games. I even help scientists calculate the path for spaceships to travel to the moon and beyond. I am simple enough for a toddler to learn on their fingers, but powerful enough to help with the world's biggest discoveries. Every time you count your steps or share your snacks, you are using a powerful idea that connects you to thousands of years of human genius. I am the first step on a giant ladder of numbers, and I am here to help you climb as high as you can imagine.