A MATH wizard from Bangalore, India, by the name of Shakantula Devi made it to the Guinness Book of Records in 1980 when she mentally multiplied two 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds. The grammar of numbers and time is not a science — too many national and cultural variations militate against a universal numbers-writing style — but we certainly can minimize unsightly crimes of prose innumeracy by agreeing on a basic numbers stylebook. Second, when numbers are used to list a series of items within a sentence, all such numbers should be written as figures (or digits) even for numbers below 11: "This explains in detail reasons 1 to 5 of the 14 reasons why I won't live in your city." But most everybody on the planet is agreed that exact dates should be written in numbers, like "March 31, 1521." We use numbers all the time in our lives, so it pays to always do our numbers right.

Source: Manila Times October 06, 2022 05:01 UTC