1

As I noted on Saturday, I caught a documentary on PBS called "Story of 1". It was hosted and co-written by Monty Python alum, Terry Jones. As the name suggests, it is indeed the story of the number 1. It begins about 6,000 years ago with the ancient Sumerians who denoted 1 with a cone-shaped "token". Jones attributes the rise of commerce and thusly cities, at least in part, to the ability to count. The story moves to ancient Greece with the great mathematicians Pythagoras and Archimedes with their adroit use of numbers to deal with practical matters as well as the theoretical such as how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe as it was known to be at the time. The ever-pragmatic Romans put the kibosh on such flights of fancy and Europeans were stuck with their unwieldy system of numerals for centuries.

The program consisted of Jones himself wandering ancient sites as well as recreations. One such recreation showed how currency was exchanged in Italy during the Middle Ages. A banker/exchanger would sit at a bench which had a grid drawn on it. You'd hand your money over to him and he'd use the grid a bit like an abacus with Roman numerals to give you your desired currency at the going exchange rate. It was noted that, if a banker was caught cheating his customers, the authorities would break his table. Banca meant bench while break was rupta and this was where our word "bankrupt" comes originated.

We were shown how Arabic numerals were introduced to the West despite having originated in India. It was the Arabs, after all, who brought them to the Europeans. We are also introduced to the invention of zero and this was a major innovation. This leads us to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz who invented the binary number system, which is comprised of nothing but 1s and 0s. From there, we take a gigantic leap forward to World War II and the first computer - Colossus. (And, as we should know, computers use the binary system.) Colossus was an enormous machine which was used to break the codes the Germans used in their communications, known as Enigma.

At an hour, I thought the show was too short and wished it could have been longer. Still, it was fascinating. It was a bit like James Burke's Connections series in the way it traced one discovery or line of thought to another. But Story of 1 was littered with tidbits of Jones' humor such as when he makes a statement about a certain group of people and says something like "or like a group of actors in a reenactment". Plus the numbers themselves were often put into scenes as CGI characters bouncing around and walking about.

I highly recommend seeing this show, if you can. Numbers are so common, so basic that we rarely think about their origins or that people actually lived without them. Imagine a world without zero. It's a strange thought indeed.

Some of the material was already familiar to me as I have read Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Number. Still, it was neat to see scenes recreated and played out plus Jones' sense of humor always makes for an engaging tale.