Sustainable Numerals: The Identity of Symbol and Value

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new numeral system, which possesses quantitative equality (identity) between symbol and value, and can be used to represent large numbers. As all the traditional numeral systems (with exception of tally marks) are limited to the qualitative equality, in which a symbol is assigned to a value by convention instead of being derived from it by some unchanging principle (e.g. an arithmetic or geometric method), they are potentially vulnerable to becoming obsolete and undecipherable under certain unfavorable conditions. We argue, therefore, that an alternative approach with higher degree of protection for storing critical information should be considered. Our proposition for such an approach is to utilize a proportional geometric binary expansion of the first two prime numbers.