Quote:
Originally posted by robot180
According to the Hebrew Calendar, this is the year 5765, (I think) which would mean that 5,765 years have passed since they began counting. If this is the year 2003, then that should mean that 2,003 years have passed since they starting counting. The way that all of you are saying, it would mean that the year 2003 is 2,002 years after they began counting. That doesn't make sense.
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As with most math things, a helpful trick I've found is to simplify the problem imensely, so here's two different ways to do it:
1. Let's try to count a decade: starting at year 1, we need to go through ten years, so we get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 all as part of the same decade. Thus, the second decade starts with year 11. The same logic can be applied to millenia.
2. Let's analyze a week (Sunday-Saturday for this example). Numbering the days, we get Sunday=1, Monday=2, Tues=3, etc. Just because Sunday is 1 doesn't mean that 1 day has been completed already--it means that we are in the middle of the first day. Thus, the start of day 2 marks the completion of 1 whole day. Expanding this to the millenium thing, the start of 2001 thus marks the completion of 2000 years, meaning two whole millenia have passed and we are starting into the third.
--Rob