Tag Archives: Heechee

March 11, 2026

Heechee Numbers

Something old and something new collided last week in a way that I found very engaging. The old was a science fiction series I read long ago, the Heechee saga by Frederik Pohl (1919-2013). What’s relevant here is that the alien Heechee used a number system based on prime numbers.

The new was this recent Substack post by Richard Green, a math writer and teacher. It, too, features a system based on primes, and I realized it solves a problem that has long bothered me about the putative Heechee number system.

Let me explain…

Leave a comment | tags: Frederik Pohl, Heechee, prime numbers, science fiction books | posted in Math

October 15, 2015

Sideband #57: Weird Math

By Wyrd Smythe

$math-clock$ In the recent post Inevitable Math I explored the idea that mathematics was both universal and inevitable. The argument is that the foundations of mathematics are so woven into the fabric of reality (if not actually being the fabric of reality) that any intelligence must discover them.

Which is not to say they would think about or express their mathematics in ways immediately recognizable to us. There could be fundamental differences, not just in their notation, but in how they conceive of numbers.

To explore that a little, here are a couple of twists on numbers:

8 Comments | tags: alien math, Frederik Pohl, Heechee, math origins, math theory, more math, prime numbers, real numbers, surreal number | posted in Math, Opinion, Sideband

June 26, 2014

Sideband #56: Spelling Numbers

By Wyrd Smythe

We’re still motoring through numeric waters but hang in there; the shore is just ahead. This is the last math theory post… for now. I do have one more up my sleeve, but that one is more of an overly long (and very technical) comment in reply to a post I read years ago. If I do write that one, it’ll be mainly to record the effort of trying to figure out the right answer.

This post picks up where I left off last time and talks more about the difference between numeric values and how we represent those values. Some of the groundwork for this discussion I’ve already written about in the L26 post and its follow-up L27 Details post. I’ll skip fairly lightly over that ground here.

Essentially, this post is about how we “spell” numbers.

3 Comments | tags: base 10, base 2, base 8, Frederik Pohl, Heechee, irrational numbers, Leopold Kronecker, natural numbers, number bases, number names, numbers, pi, prime numbers, rational numbers | posted in Math, Sideband