How does place value let us write huge numbers with only ten digits?
The House Party
How does place value let us write huge numbers with only ten digits?
We only have ten digits to work with: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. That's it. No secret eleventh digit hiding in a drawer. And yet somehow we can write the number of stars in the sky, the grains of sand on a beach, the dollars in a billionaire's bank account. How? The trick isn't the digits themselves. It's where you stand them.
Here's the secret. A digit's value depends on its address — its spot in the line. Take the digit 3. Sitting all alone, it means three. Scoot it one house to the left and stick a 0 beside it, and now it means thirty. Same little 3, completely different paycheck. The digit didn't change. Its neighborhood did.
