Unary Memes

Ever thought our number system was too complicated? Welcome to Base 1, where everything is beautifully simple... and endlessly tedious! 🤣 In normal number systems like Base 10 (what we use daily) or Base 2 (binary), we have different digits. But in Base 1? You only get ONE digit: 1. That's it! So the number 7 becomes "1111111" - literally just counting 1s. And poor π? It's an infinite string of 1s that would take over 1.4 million digits just to start! This is basically the mathematical equivalent of trying to write a novel using only the letter 'A'. Technically possible, practically insane! Mathematicians call this "unary notation" - the most inefficient yet conceptually simple number system possible. And notice how zero is just... nothing? That's actually perfect - in Base 1, zero is represented by an empty string. Mind blown yet? 🤯

The equation "123 + 456 = 123456" is hilariously wrong in our decimal system, but it's actually correct if you're operating in base 1 (unary numeral system)! In base 1, numbers are represented by sequences of a single symbol - so "123" actually means "111" (or just 3 in decimal), and "456" means "111111" (or 6 in decimal). When you concatenate them, you get "111111111" (or 9 in decimal). It's like counting on your fingers but refusing to use more than one finger at a time. The bell curve shows the perfect distribution of people who get the joke - those who immediately reject it as wrong (left), those who understand the base 1 cleverness (right), and the blissfully confused majority in the middle who somehow think string concatenation is valid arithmetic. Mathematical humor at its nerdiest!