It took three days to teach these rough guys to learn from 0. After three days of learning, finally, they finally memorized the numbers.

What should be taught next?

Judging from the rhythm of teaching Liu, Guan and Zhang at that time, he should be teaching multiple digits.

Li Mengxi wanted to do some research first to see what the villagers' concepts of numbers were.

Li Mengxi asked, "Everyone, what is the largest number?"

"Ten thousand? Ten thousand pounds!" Gouzi, who was crowded in the front, answered the question very actively.

"Where is ten thousand?" Someone next to me retorted, "It's one million, one million catties!"

This wasn't the end, there was another voice saying it was tens of millions.

Noisy.

Li Mengxi watched all this with interest.

Two problems arise.

One is a conceptual issue.

Fellow countrymen, I don’t know the difference between numbers and quantities.

Li Mengxi asked what the maximum number was, and Gouzi made a bad start. Gouzi said it was ten thousand catties, and everyone behind him was led astray.

Numbers should not have units.

This is the first question.

The second question is that you don’t know if you don’t ask. Once you ask, you will find that the math knowledge of the poor peasants at the bottom of this era is really very shallow.

Strictly speaking, the local warriors do not fully understand digital knowledge.

Although, they know that there are ten thousand hundred, and they know that when there are ten, they move forward one.

However, it may be that there is no simple counting method and it is difficult to remember the numbers and digits. Therefore, the village heroes have no concept of the limits of numbers.

What is the largest number?

These rural warriors from the lowest background do not have the need to contact and understand large numbers in their daily lives.

Maybe, only when they look up at the sky at night during the slack time of farming, on a certain night, the weather is good, and there are so many stars in the sky, and they look at the countless stars in the sky, then their thinking will temporarily break away from the shackles of land and farm work.

For a moment, they will think and sigh, "How many stars are there even if they don't touch it?"

Let out a sigh.

"There are thousands of things to do." An old man next to him looked up and interjected.

"Where! Stop talking!" Another person also interjected.

Then, that's the end of it.

I have to do farm work tomorrow, and I have to pull out the grass in the field quickly.

Most people have only a fleeting moment of imagination about vastness, huge numbers, and limits throughout their lives.

When Newton saw an apple falling from a tree, he suddenly wondered why the apple fell to the ground instead of flying to the sky. From this, he studied downward and discovered the force of gravity.

When a poor man from the bottom of ancient China looked at the starry sky, he once had a question about the geometry of the stars in the sky.

So why didn't a low-level commoner in the Han Dynasty create astronomy or the mathematical concept of limits out of a sudden idea?

The answer is that the material base determines the superstructure.

Human beings, whether in the East or the West, starting from ancient Homo sapiens, have never lacked imagination about the starry sky.

Only when survival is no longer a problem, and when you don’t have to exhaust all your energy for survival, can you have spare energy to study things related to the superstructure.

What Newton was like to the farmers in the late Han Dynasty was that Newton had no worries about food and clothing, and the farmers had to run around all day long.

The brave villagers don’t know what the maximum number is.

And the answer is that the numbers can be as large as there is no limit.

On this day, Li Mengxi put aside his teaching progress. He wiped off the traces of white lime on the shield with a damp cloth, then replaced it with a 0, then another 0, and drew many rows of zeros.

Li Mengxi pointed at the village heroes and told them one by one.

One, ten, hundreds, thousands, ten thousand...

Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, billions...

Trillion, trillion trillion, trillion trillion.

Until, there was no more writing on the shield.

Below, the village heroes who were listening carefully, their eyes widened and their mouths slightly opened. At this time, for the first time, they got rid of the poverty, humbleness and ignorance of generations. Deep in their thinking

, reaching a vastness and infinity that has never been touched before.

"If I add another zero at the end, what would it be?" Li Mengxi smiled and made a virtual circle on the edge of the shield, where there was no open space.

"It's ten trillion trillion trillion!" a voice from the back row of Xiangyong shouted with excitement at the top of his lungs.

Li Mengxi smiled, and he glanced at everyone, "Then, if it is as big as ten trillion trillion, is it the largest one? Can it get bigger?"

The crow and magpie were silent for a moment.

"Just add another zero!" Someone with a thick accent muttered in the crowd.

Li Mengxi heard it.

"Then if, ten trillion trillion plus zero, what is it?"

Li Mengxi asked with a smile.

Add another zero, and it's just a hundred trillion trillion trillion.

That's all.

It was getting dark before I realized it.

Before I knew it, it was so dark that I couldn't see my fingers.

Finally, Li Mengxi asked, what is the largest number? Is there a largest number?

The village heroes were silent.

At the beginning, the village heroes probably answered that the largest number was tens of thousands or millions.

But, as the learning progresses.

Li Mengxi asked again midway, if there is a maximum number? Most of the village heroes hesitated and answered uncertainly, "There is a maximum number."

Then, Li Mengxi kept adding zeros.

Keep adding.

I didn't do anything today, so I added zero.

At the end, Li Mengxi asked, what is the largest possible number?

The village heroes were silent, and no one answered.

If they are ignorant, the local heroes can be extremely confident and directly answer the number they think is the largest without hesitation, or confidently say that ten thousand is the largest, or one hundred thousand is the largest.

But when the Xiangyong knew a little about it, the Xiangyong became less confident and became much timid. They no longer dared to say without hesitation that there was the largest number. At this time, they hesitated and said that there might be the largest number.

Count it.

When the village heroes really understood the numbers, they became even more timid. They were timid and did not dare to make any judgments.

Ignorance gives people courage, but the more knowledge they have, the more aware they are of their own shortcomings.

The night was so dark that no one could be seen.

Li Mengxi asked several times whether there was the largest number and what the largest number was.

The crows and magpies were silent, and there was silence.

No one said anything.

Li Mengxi laughed, and he solemnly told everyone, word for word, "Please remember, there is no maximum number, the number can be infinite! Endless!"

The hearts of all the local heroes suddenly became bright.

——

Night, bonfire.

The cooked wheat porridge is fragrant.

Learning calligraphy has been going on for three days. Today, the brave villagers who have learned calligraphy are more excited and talkative than before.

People couldn't keep their mouths shut even while eating, and there were centurions everywhere talking endlessly about knowledge to their group.

Numbers can be infinitely large.

What does infinity mean.

It means that thinking has no boundaries and extends to the limit.

There are as many numbers as you want to think of.

Poverty and ignorance imprison the body.

But the soul can escape the limitations of the times and society and enjoy true freedom.

At the end of the Han Dynasty, in this terrible ancient troubled times, in the study of the limits of numbers, the minds of the village heroes let go freely for the first time. For the first time, the mind got rid of the confinement of the body and the limit of what the eyes could see, and the mind transcended everything.

The limitations of the body, environment, and material are released into infinity and boundlessness.

Thinking seems to have no limits.
Chapter completed!