Vic Socotra

I Ides, March MMIX

Numbers

I ventured fairly far afield yesterday, but it was a worth trip. I was hoping to find in a nice, approachable way to describe what we are in the process of doing to ourselves.

I had the vain hope that I might discover something that

I know my limits, and I am fortunate enough to have friends who help to point them out. One colleague who enjoys a superb analytic mind, mulled over the suggestion and refined it.

He is a Yale man, after all, and his generation of Old Eli’s still read the classics. The man for whom the university is named, Elihu Yale, drew upon the huge fortune gained as a former servant of the East India Company, where he also served as colonial governor of Madras.

Gov. Yale made a substantial donation to the fledgling Connecticut college in 1718 in the hope of changing a puritan institution into one more aligned with the Church of England.

It worked, for a century or two, but all things pass away and lose relevance over time. Like zeros.

He looked at the proposal, and pointed out the logical flaw in my reasoning. “Instead of 1,200,000,000,000 (trillion two hundred billion) being “TII” (which I would suggest is 1,000,000,000,002) is should be “T” for your Tera 1,000,000,000,000 and two “C” with three lines on top of each “C” representing a hundred billion . . . with each line representing a power of 10 X 3.”

TCC
“As you point out, though, the Romans never had need for numbers of this size, and I am sure they would appreciate the elegance of this solution. Of course, this would also be one trillion, two hundred billion, using relatively accepted convention. I am not aware that they ever used more than one line above a character. This would be the more elegant solution, fully in accord with the ways of ancient Rome.”

MCC

I took it all on board. Unfortunately, both appear to be logos for communications companies, and may in fact already be trademarked.

Accordingly, I suggest the way may be to go a symbol that has already passed into the public domain, and which describes a hopeful attitude about the amount of money we are expecting our children and grandchildren to provide the Republic:

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