i used to belive that 100 was the biggest number in the world "i got at least a hundred marbles."

dan harris

I used to believe that numbers had gender.
8 being the most masculine, because it's fat. And 7 being the most feminine because it's thin.

Ale Nijamkin

I also used to believe that 100 was the biggest number. When the boy next door told me the biggest number was infinity, I flew into a rage, called him a silly white pooper (our worst insult at the time) and refused to beilve him. I grudgingly admitted he was right several years later, after he badgered me about it about once a month until I did. I've always hated being wrong.

Stonergirl

when i was about three, my dad told me (or i misunderstood him) that it would take a whole day to count to one hundred. so i would go and ask him if we could go to the movie theatre and he would say "maybe tommorow" so i would go away, count to 100 and then ask him again. That misunderstaning got cleared up very quickly

austin

After the last one, I learned about a hundred, thousand, and a million. At this time I understood that you could have a million and one, and such, but I didn't know what came after 9,999,999. Embarrasingly, I somehow got it into my head that fazonga was the next number up, then after 99,999,999 (9 fazonga, 9 million, 999 thousand, 999) would be GAZONGA, which was actually a 100 million, then a billion would be a MAZONGA.

number freak

When I was little I didn't really understand how numbers worked, I knew that you could carry on counting forever so naturally I assumed that the number system was cyclic, you obviously couldn't have that many different numbers.

When counting in 10s in my number system you went '10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 20, 30, 40.... ad infinitum

obviously with numbers less than 20 you knew whether they were bigger or smaller than each other, cos you only used them once, but when asked as a child 'is 30 bigger or smaller than 20' I replied 'id depends on which 20'

I'm quite good at maths now..

Helen

I had convinced myself that that "even" meant "1,3,5,7" and "odd" meant "2,4,6,8" because of the letters...one, three, and five all had "e's" in them, and seven had the word "even" in it...and two and four had "o's" in them, just like the word odd.

I have no idea how I managed to do so well in elementary school.

Kira

I used to think that a few meant the same thing as a couple. Those two were also the same as a dozen. So my dad often got mad at me for that!

Lily

There was a raging argument in my second or third grade class about whether infinity or a googol is the biggest number, and whether infinity exists at all. First someone had to tell me about infinity, but I was "pro-infinity" till the end.

Aretia

When I first learned about infinity I thought it was totally the coolest idea ever. Zero was almost as cool because when you divide by zero, you get infinity. (Also zero was neither positive nor negative, but unique and totally its own thing -- how cool is that?) The wussy teachers and the math books used to say that dividing by zero was "undefined," but I thought that was some kind of a cop-out -- if you graphed it out, it obviously went to infinity. Why didn't they just say so?

And for some reason the teachers never really wanted to talk about infinity much -- they just looked uncomfortable and changed the subject. What were they hiding? I was sure there was some kind of conspiracy going on.

Ernest

When I was very small, I couldn't deal with the fact that there were "number words" that weren't definite. I mean words like "a couple", "a few" and "several". I pestered my mother about this until she told me that "a couple" was 2. Eventually I made up a whole system where "a few" was 3, and "several" was 7. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that people were sometimes just talking about an unspecified number!

PsyXe

I am so glad that some of you were talking about how you thought numbers had different personalities. Here I was thinking that I was the only one.

I always thought that 8 was a mean number. In order to understand, you'd have to see how I added nine to another number that was less than ten.
for example: 9+3=12
First, I'd look at the three and subtract one from it which is two. Then, I'd place a one in front of it.
So I always thought nine was so generous for only taking away one, but 8 was mean because he took away two. Somehow seven and lower didn't end up being mean.

Rachel

Even numbers were the goodies and odd numbers were the baddies.
Two even numbers added together would get along fine and make another even number. (2+2=4)
Two odd numbers added together would fight and an even number would then come stand there when they had killed each other.(3+3=6)
An odd with an even would fight but the baddie would win because he was strong. (2+3=5) I was always a little scared of this.

I worked all this out in about year three, then was amazed to find it came in useful in year 9 maths. To this day I think of the odd numbers as being antisocail.

Mahoney

When I was about five or six I remember sitting in the school dinner hall boasting to my friends that I could count all the way to a thousand. Demonstrating I counted 1, 2, 3, ..., 99, 100, 101,... 108, 109, 1000. Incidentally one of the boys to whom I was boasting managed to count to 3000 without cheating when he was sixteen, one boring afternoon.

Stephen K from Scotland

When I was 6 years old, I somehow got the concept that counting was infinite - you could always go one higher. Naturally, I concluded that EVERY WORD is a number! So cow, pencil, and airplane were numbers, I just didn't know where they went in the whole scheme of things. This still makes sense to me.

Gary

I used to think that you could never count to 100 because 90 sounds so much like 19 which meant that ou would simply continue to loop from 90 back to 19 in a never ending cycle. I also convinced my friends this was true.

Benjamin

When I was young, I asked my mom, "You know how 1+1 is 2, and 3+3 is 6, and 7+7 is 14? Well, what 2 numbers make 5?" She said, "Well, 2 + 3 is 5". I said, "NO!!! I mean what two SAME numbers make 5?"

She told me that there weren't any. I couldn't accept that answer. I must have spent an hour trying to come up with the correct answer. No, I didn't know about fractions or decimals at that age.

Joe Martinez

When I started kindergarten, I believed that 100 came directly after 29. Because 29 was the highest number I could count to. I just believed that that was the highest number there was. All the other numbers weren't really numbers, just adjectives, like if you had 36 bananas, 36 was just something that described them, not the quantity.

Jamie

I used to believe numbers and letters had genders. They were all family too.

1 was a boy.
2 was a girl.
3 was a boy.
4 was a girl.
5 was a mean ugly girl that looked like a boy.
6 was a girl.
7 was a tomboy. Lol.
8 was a boy.
9 was a boy.
10 was the smart and strong boy.
11 was the smart and strong girl.
12 was a geeky boy.
13 and 14 were twins. They were very pretty girls.
15 was a sporty jock guy.
16 was the kool kid.
17 was the acoholic.
18 was the smartest.

Go figure.

I still see them as that...

hehe.

13

i used to believe that one dozen was the same as one thousand ifound out that it was 12 when i was in 5th grade

wacko