Innumeracy

You can take a quick test for innumeracy right here. Carefully count the number of tines on this fork. If you experience any difficulty in arriving at a definitive amount, you are probably infected, and should seek professional help ASAP.

Whoops! Maybe you were looking for illiteracy?

Innumeracy is the physiological condition characterized by the innate inability to grasp the size of sufficiently-large but finite numbers. Since there are infinitely many finite numbers, and the human brain has its limits, it follows that there exists an extremely large but finite number n such that every living human on Earth (and by extension every human who has ever and will ever live) cannot possibly conceive of just how big n really is. Therefore, everybody, without exception, suffers from innumeracy; although some people are more innumerate than others.

Onset and diagnosis

An indeterminate number of jelly beans: democracy's worst nightmare.

The early onset of innumeracy can be an intimidating experience for the below-average person. It can start without warning just by being exposed to pi (the mysterious ratio between a circle's something and something else) for the very first time.

Innumerologists can usually diagnose an acute case within seconds by testing the subject's ability (or inability) to determine exactly how many jelly beans are contained in a jar full of jelly beans. Such persons who fail this most simple and basic test are obviously not qualified to vote in general elections, even for President. Another method of detecting innumeracy involves tricking two patients into playing a game of who can name the biggest number. If the contest lasts any longer than three minutes without resolution, both are absolutely certifiable. Such persons must at all costs be kept away from any form of money in order to prevent runaway inflation.

Case study # 1 (Innumeracy of One)

Bertrand Russell's incredible achievement in the field of advanced mathematics (first submitted to the Daily Mail in 1910 for intensive fact-checking) continues to dazzle us to this day.

The first mathematician to diagnose his own innumeracy was Bertrand Russell, when he came to realize that he was having immense difficulty moving past page 379 of his grand opus Principia Mathematica. After having successfully proved, after many years of hard and grueling labor, that 1+1=2, Russell simply ran out of steam. He corresponded by snail-mail with his bitter old rival David Hilbert, his bitter young rival Kurt Gödel, and his former elementary school teacher, but to no avail. They all laughed derisively at Russell's crippling disability, the unfeeling bastards. This was in spite of the fact that they all shared the same debilitating condition, albeit in vastly different orders of magnitude.

Russell never completely recovered from his brush with the terrifying collosity of single-digit numbers. Even Albert Einstein, who could himself barely comprehend the process of integrating an Abelian groupoid of topological fibre bundles over an embedded non-Euclidean Riemann manifold supplied with pseudohyperbolic coordinates, couldn't quite figure out what the hell Russell was going on about. And so he (Russell) died, brokenhearted and clueless.

Case study # 2 (Innumeracy of Another One)

Ronald "McDonald" Graham (of Graham's number fame) was one of the most famous and innumerate mathematicians of all time, which really isn't saying much. His initial overestimate of how many edges a cube has (supposably twelve) shocked and awed the vast majority of his colleagues: Fewer than half of them (about 437 billion trillion quadrillion) couldn't even figure out what the hell Graham was going on about.

After many long years of hard and grueling labor working in a Californian illegal-migrant sweatshop for pennies an hour, since nobody ever made any real money just doing mathematics, Graham returned to the problem at hand and attempted to trim the excess fat from his somewhat unwieldy theorem. It was only a random chance encounter with a gifted second-grader by the name of Alonzo "Ñ" Garcia who set the elderly Graham on the proper path: "Why don't you just count them, you doofus?" And thus Ronald Graham finally got awarded his first and only Nobel Prize for Mathematics.

Unfortunately, Graham died in 2020, well before completing his edge-counting endeavor, thus leaving the remainder of the task to future generations. His last will and testament donated the original cube to the University of California, Berkeley, where it remains standing, vandalized with embellished with colorful spray-painted BLM graffiti art to this day.

Case study # U (Innumeracy of You)

How many fingers am I holding up?

You are so innumerate you can't count to 21 without taking your clothes off. You are so innumerate you think text-messaging numbers are way too complicated. You are so innumerate you have trouble figuring out your income tax in spite of never having held a job. You are so innumerate you think clocks and calendars were invented to torture people. You are so innumerate you don't believe one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. You are so innumerate you wonder how many Wonder Twins there are. You are so innumerate you think it doesn't matter what you do with your fingers in public. You are so innumerate you describe yourself as a people-person. You are so innumerate even Sesame Street drop-outs pity you. You are so innumerate you think the empty set is hiding something from you. You are so innumerate dogs can differentiate numerical quantities better than you can. You are so innumerate you can't even comprehend the process of integrating an Abelian groupoid of topological fibre bundles over an embedded non-Euclidean Riemann manifold supplied with pseudohyperbolic coordinates. And I didn't even mention that atrocious haircut etc.

Case study # ∞

As for me, I stopped counting when I was 35. Damn, I hate birthday parties.

See also

• Count
• Discount