How to count to 144 with your hands: the scientific trick

How to count to 60 with your hands? Just count on phalanges instead of on the fingers with a method that in the simple version allows us to count up to 60, but in the more complicated version up to 144.

This counting method consists of counting the units on the phalanges of a hand and the dozens with your fingers of the other hand, and is based on the fact that each finger is composed of 3 phalanges and four fingers make up a dozen (see figure below).

To count, proceed as follows:

• With the thumb let’s count them unit touching the phalanges of the other fingers of the hand. Let’s start with the first phalanx of the index finger, the number 1then the second and third (numbers 2 and 3), then we move on to the first phalanx of the middle finger, number 4 and so on until we reach thelast phalanx of the little finger, number 12.
• When we get to 12 we put it aside 1 dozen lifting a finger of the second hand.
• We continue counting the units with the first hand and raising a finger of the second hand every time we reach 12.

While counting we can always understand what number we have arrived at by looking at the position of the thumb of the first hand and the number of raised fingers of the second hand. In the example of the figure below, 2 dozen were counted and then the thumb stopped at the ninth phalanx, then we counted 2 dozen plus 9 unitsthat is to say 12 × 2 + 9 = 33.

Continuing in this way, when we come to raise 5 fingers of the second hand it means we counted 5 dozenthat is to say 12×5 which corresponds precisely to 60. In short, with two hands we manage to count to 60.

As we have seen, reaching up to 60 is easy, but with a little further effort we can count up to 144. To do this just use the second hand exactly the same way as the first one: we use the thumb to mark the dozens on the phalanges. For example, in the figure below we counted 9 dozens and 9 ones, or 117.

In this way we can count 12 dozens by touching the last phalanx of the little finger with the thumb, but twelve dozen, 12 × 12, correspond precisely to 144.