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This is a good book. But on page 5 you have an error: it should say trillionth instead of billionth. I find myself liking your approach, though. You should change the font and insert some more diagrams.

Oh, what's that... you can't just republish instantly because electronic computers haven't been invented yet? Well, just iterate and do things that don't scale :)




It's actually circa 1914 British usage rather than an error.


Really? What'd they call a one followed by nine zeros then?


A milliard.

The word is still used by countries that use the 'long scale', which has the nice property that a billion = (1 million)^2 and a quadrillion = (1 million)^4 etc. If you can count in greek this also means that an n-illion times an m-illion equals an (n+m)-illion.


This strikes me as a vastly superior way of doing things..

Any insight as to why things went 'the wrong way'?


Apparently [1], both ways of counting originate from France. This 'superior' way came first and was adapted by the British, then our current way of naming was created and adopted by the US. Wiki says this one then became the standard because of USA's dominance in the financial world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers#Extensi...


Not sure what they called our definition of a billion, but that was definitely the naming scheme [0]

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-is-a-bill...


In many countries it is called one thousand million.




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