According to my girlfriend, mathematically the “20s” have only begun since the start of this year as of 01/01/2021.
I’m open to the concept, as I googled it and it seems to be some kind of “school of thought” but I think she was doing a really bad example of explaining it to me, using examples such as the 1st floor of a building is the ground floor, technically. But that isn’t really mathematical, because in maths you begin with 0 then, for example, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 etc, but I’m not that confident of my maths skills as I’ve never particularly been that good.
She also said because you go from 1BC to 1AD, there was no “Zero Before Christ” or “0 Anno Domini”, but I argued that that is just where we decided the consecutive years begin from with the Gregorian Calendar, and isn’t mathematical.
Am I fundamentally mistaking what she means by mathematical? It was kind of starting to make my head hurt as according to that math, somebody isn’t 10 years old until they’ve been alive for 11 years, which is what I said to her, and she said yes, then seemed confused herself. which is why I’m requesting an from you guys, as from googling the subject, I’ve found myself quite interested in this concept but I’m massively struggling to wrap my head around it.
Thanks 🙂
In: Mathematics
Your girlfriend is only correct in the most old fashions of terms.
The 3rd decade, of the 21st century began in 2021.
But the 20’s started in 2020.
They use different convention.
The first one uses the 1 to 0 convention.
The second one uses the 0 to 9 convention.
Nobody really uses the 1 to 0 convention for decades, only for centuries.
This only really came back into living memory because there was controversy on when the 3rd millennium started in 2000 or 2001.
And a lot of people were wrong in thinking it was the start of the 2nd millennium.
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