How high can you count on your fingers? (Spoiler: much higher than 10) – James Tanton



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How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers — or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands, which we use to count to ten. But is that really as high as we can go? James Tanton investigates.

Lesson by James Tanton, animation by TED-Ed.

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46 Comments

  1. You can count even much higher by sequencially using different base system, like after 1023 in base 2 we could switch to base 3 and resume counting. Moreover, base 6 is also possible if you consider five fingers on one hand to point at one of the 6 segments of each finger on the other hand, resulting in a count of (6^5 – 1).

  2. Yeah, but in that base 2 one, what's 132? Probably won't be using it to count. I'm fine with my method of reaching 100 [or 99] (normal till five, then drop the pinky, ring, middle, pointer fingers in that order. Bringing in the thumb gives you 0, letting your second hand be the tens place)

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