Use the Binary Finger Method to Easily Count to 59,048 or Higher
If you thought you could only count to 10 with your fingers, think again. Using the binary system, you can quickly count to tens of thousands.
In this TED-Ed YouTube video, mathematician James Tanton explains how useful your fingers are when it comes to counting. By assigning binary values to your fingers – your right thumb is one, and each finger on the left has a double value than the previous finger – you can count to 1023 without losing sight. But if you can bend each of the fingers in three states – lowered, bent and raised – you can assign more values to the fingers and count to 59,048. You can count even more with more hand positions, but at this point you should probably think about a different system.
How high can you count on your fingers? (Spoiler alert: much higher than 10) | Youtube