Math for Breakfast

Thursday morning, I was minding my own business and eating waffles for breakfast. Waffles are my new favorite thing to eat. I was sitting at the counter and Ben was at the table on his computer. Ben is a computer science major and was working on homework.

He was talking out loud about what he was working on. My knowledge of computer science being basically nonexistent, I had no clue what he was talking about. I told Benjamin as much and he explained in simpler terms. I accepted his explanation without further question. Ben, however, didn't seem content with the simple fix to my ignorance on the subject.

"Do you know anything about bases?" Ben asked me, walking to join me at the counter. 

"Mmm ... I don't know," I said. 

"Do you know what place values are?" He asked. 

"Maybe," I said with a shrug. "I don't remember." 

Ben grabbed the nearest piece of paper and started writing out 1, 10, 100, 1000. "So this," he said, pointing to his paper, "would be the ones place, the tens place, the--" 

"Oh!" I said, cutting him off and feeling a little silly for not knowing what he had been talking about before. "Yeah, yeah, I know. I just didn't realize that's what you were talking about when you said it." 

Ben nodded. "So we use a base ten." He then explained what using a base ten meant. It seemed pretty familiar to me; I think we probably learned about it in math when I was in high school. After he'd finished his explanation to me, I felt very content with the extent of my math lesson. 

"Can you imagine if we had to use a base four?" I asked rhetorically. I thought it was a good comment to end with. 

"Let's try it," Ben said. Without waiting for my inevitable protest, he grabbed the piece of paper again. He wrote it out and explained how to figure everything out. We then spent a few minutes writing out different numbers with a base of four. 

Then Ben said, "Now, what if we had a base 2?" 

I groaned. Ben smiled. He wrote it all out and we figured out how you would write different numbers in this base too. 

"This is binary math," he explained excitedly. "It's what computers use." 

At the end of my math lesson, Ben said reassuringly, "Don't worry, I've done this to lots of people--my mom, Melissa, Dalin ..." The list went on and on. 

I suppose that's what I get for marrying a nerd. At least he'll be rich, right?