Dear Thinkers,

Sometimes I think the entire history of human knowledge is nothing more than breaking things down into their pieces. When you learn to read and write, you start out with letters and sounds. Then you go on to words. Eventually, you’re filling notebooks with pages and pages of stories and poems. For a long time, scientists weren’t exactly sure what was in the human body. They had an idea that everything was made up of tiny pieces called atoms, but they couldn’t really prove it. Now we not only know that atoms exist, but we can break living things down even farther into strands of DNA that hold all of the information about that living thing. Computers exist because humans figured out how to break information down into pieces so simple that they can be moved at a lightning speed with electricity.

Today, we’ll talk about one way that mathematicians break information into pieces so it can be easily shared and manipulated, and we’ll see all the possibilities that offers us.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck