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Wise Woman's Wish

Audience:

Hi, thanks for viewing my entry! I created a one-picture illustration to help people understand how exponents work. The story behind this picture is that there was an old wives' tale about a king who wanted to reward a wise woman for her services to the kingdom. She asked for one gold coin on one square, twice that on the next square, and so on and so forth until an 8x8 grid of squares was filled. The king agreed, not realizing how much money that is! I created this picture as a way to both capture that story and visually see how much that is--each rectangle is a proportionate representation of the amount of money starting from a single coin, and of course the size cuts off because the numbers get too large. I do hope that this image is helpful in classrooms and such, and please do feel free to share it if you find it helpful or know someone who might! If you'd like to use it in a more professional capacity, I do kindly request you cite Ikonosophy under a Creative Commons license or reach out to [email protected] for a more direct request. Talking about it in an educational capacity i.e. to students is of course fine.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GbybKkBjxr8Ig8_vQ7SBUd3oQ5ngfC6K/view?usp=sharing

Analytics

4 Overall score*

63 Rank

5 Votes

4 Comments

Comments

I like your story.

The smart king would say each of his gold pieces are a single atom of gold. Therefore, he would need to provide the number of atoms divided by Avogadros number multiplied by the atomic mass

(2^63+2^62+2^61+…+2+1)/(6.02x10^23)*196.97 =1.84x10^19/(6.02x10^23)*196.97=0.0060356 grams of gold.

Using the first result in google (after the incorrect ai summary) the price of gold in Australian dollars is $5457.71 per 31.1 grams of gold, multiplying this with our weight gives

0.0060356*5457.71/31.1=$1.06

I hope the wise woman only did one minutes worth of work or she is not getting paid well with a smart king.

Nice idea! A whole short comic with some more visualisations would be cool!

6.6

Having a size comparison was great, and visually seeing the differences between say 2^3 and 2^15 was very clear. It would have been more mind-blowing if it became interactive, allowing to scale and really see the difference as it goes higher up in the exponents.

2.3

Really hard to rank. This is surely a good visual for the “wheat and chessboard problem.” I just feel like this isn’t quite novel enough to dethrone the classic way of describing this. I do like the narrative and the two ways of showing the expanding values, but it needs some polish.