In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.
From the article! For anyone struggling, the placements go 1’s, 20’s, 400’s, 8,000’s, 160,000’s, etc. Take each placement and multiply it by 20 to get the next one! (The Hindu-Arabic system goes 1’s, 10’s, 100’s, 1,000’s, 10,000’s, 100,000’s, for reference)
How they got 24,516 from here really confused me until I broke it down, so I’ll do the same for others!

The first numeral represents 4, and it’s in the 8,000’s place, which means it represents 24,000. This system doesn’t have a dedicated 10,000’s place, which means the amount of individual numerals will be smaller. Next we have the numeral representing 1, and it’s in the 400’s place, meaning it represents 400.
This means so far we have 24,400, meaning we still have 116 left to write. We can’t put 400 into 100 without using fractions, which we don’t want in our integer system by definition, so we instead look to the 20’s place. The most amount of 20’s we can fit into 116 without fractions is 5, which is why the symbol for 5 is there. This just leaves 16 for the 1’s position!
We can look at it in terms of “number we write”(place value). 24,516 = 3(8,000) + 1(400) + 5(20) + 16(1)!
I highly encourage everyone to read the article and look into this, this is revolutionary.















