Comment on What do you think is the largest number a human can actually grasp / truly comprehend?

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jerkface@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

There’s also conflation with the number of “chunks” we can hold in mind at a time, which is often estimated at about seven things. But that doesn’t mean we don’t comprehend what eight is.

Numbers are DEEP. You can’t just know things about a number, you have to discover them empirically, experimentally. Every number has essentially infinite properties and you can’t know everything about a number, but you get a familiarity with them. Still, even the simplest numbers have the capacity to surprise in the right context.

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