Dear Reckoners,
Based on what we know, we figure out new things. That’s kind of the foundation of math. First humans started counting things. Perhaps it was how many stone tools they had. In that case, they only had to count up to five or six. Then, they started living in larger groups, and to count people, they needed larger numbers. Then, they started planting wheat, harvesting it, and giving it out to people in their group. This mean that had to take numbers and break them up into parts. Eventually, they decided that just counting numbers didn’t represent everything they needed to represent, so they came up with in-between numbers. We call those fractions, decimals, and percents.

Numbers are powerful things. They run our world. If you want to have a voice in how the world runs, you need to learn how to do things with numbers. It’s really that simple.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck