100 Rupye Ki Baat!

Disclaimer to start with – This post is as random as it gets. This is about the number “100” that is a great source of amazement & mystery to me! There is hardly an object, concept or theory that carries almost the same meaning across so many disciplines. And there is definitely no "number" that signifies the same across so many aspects of life. Figure this out:

-The distance seems really long if it’s beyond 100 kilometers!
-The speed feels too high once you throttle your vehicle above 100 kmph!
-The company is huge if it has 100 employees!
-You have done well as a batsman if you’ve scored a 100!
-You are a bowler to be reckoned with if you’ve taken a 100 wickets in a season!
-You’ve lived a healthy life if you trot along till you’re a 100 years old!
-100 goals in a career – Boy, that’s some striker!
-The team scored a 100 points in a basketball match…that’s high!
-100 television channels to choose from – that’s some choice for the viewer!
-The building is sky-high if it has a 100 floors!
--A 100 minute movie - Ideal by Hollywood standards!
-Bowling at 100 mph? – Jeff Thompson almost managed it!
-Congratulations – you’ve just won yourself a grand prize of a 100 thousand dollars!
-The movie is a hit – just completed 100 days at Maratha Mandir!
-A 100 marks – I never got ‘em in any exam (One example from personal experience… err…I mean the lack of it)

- And then there are opinions! - “That obese lump of lard weighs must weight at least 100 kgs”, "You know the guy is such a con – he can come up with 100 excuses for everything", "The dude is a casanova– must have slept with a 100 women"

The history provides sufficient proof of the fact that the concept of number was born directly from observations of real phenomena exhibited by the natural forces. But this number 100 seems like a number around which the man has fostered his life.

Why did this particular number gain so much significance? Is it just because it’s the first three digit number that appears after a big list of 90 two-digit numbers? I read this wonderful quote that “mathematics arises wherever there are difficult problems that involve quantity, space or change”. And it surely seems to me, that in lots of cases wherever man wanted to impose a numerical limit to something that seemed like an excess, he’s used the number 100.

But my question is why only 100? Why did we end up having the fraction system based on 100? Why not a number like 96, 90, 84, 72, 60, etc. that have more factors than 100?

The logic here, as many of us would already know is that the metric system or the decimal based system is based on the “metre” & “gram” and is the most widely used system in the world recognized by International System of Units, the benefit of the system being that it has a single base for each physical quantity and all other related units are multiples of 10 of this base unit. The actual history is interesting too– Post the French revolution in 1789, this system was devised in France when Louis XVI ordered the mathematicians to develop a unified measurement system as a replacement to the multiple & incongruent systems in prevalence then.

Keeping history aside, it still beats me as to why this number signifies the height or excess of something across so many measurable & even figurative areas (Right from having a vision to own a 100 companies to having the urge to slap that dimwit Fardeen Khan a 100 times). The above examples and am sure many more that we will keep encountering around this beautiful number will reinforce & vindicate the point that numbers and particularly the number 100 belongs in the mind rather than in the empirical world!