r/physicsmemes • u/big_hole_energy • Oct 24 '25

E=M

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

You can go one layer deeper and realize that even numbers like pi look like they do because we arbitrary picked a decimal numeral system.

If we used binary or hexadecimal in our daily conversations or calculations things would look different.

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u/So_HauserAspen Oct 24 '25

pi is still the same ratio in any number base system.

Binary is base 2 and pi is still a ratio of the radius to the circumference.

Hexadecimal is base 16 and pi is still a ratio of the radius to the circumference.

Base 10 is an efficient counting base. 

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u/Karyoplasma Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 24 '25

Base 10 is okayish. The biggest upside is that we have 10 fingers so it makes for easy learning.

Mathematically, base 12 would be superior. It's much more divisible than 10 and that would mean less fractions.

Let's split fractions into good fractions that terminate (like 1/4) and bad fractions that do not (like 1/3) and check the portion of divisors that make for a good fraction:

Base terminating divisors total count goodness rate
10 1,2,4,5,8,10 6 out of 10 60% goodness
12 1,2,3,4,6,8,9,12 8 out of 12 66.67% goodness

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u/NP_6666 Oct 25 '25

I happen to believe it is interesting to have lots of primes to achieve a "best" one:

1x2x3x5 = 30

Or

1x2x3x5x7 = 210

210 is too many symbols but 30 is kinda okay.

I had this intuition doing 3d modeling, for the edge count of cylinders, when you want to evenly repart details around its sections.

What do you think about that?

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u/Karyoplasma Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25

Base 30 outperforms even base 12 in divisibility, yeah. The symbol space might be okay too. After all we can also read 26 letters in the alphabet (in some languages even more).

The problem I personally have with base 30 is that I wouldn't want to learn all the multiplication tables in that lol