My 8-year-old was talking about doing some math this summer. “But interesting math,” he added.

“What’s something that’s not interesting math?” I asked.

“You know, like, 1 + 1. That’s not interesting.”

Well, he’d thrown down the gauntlet. So I got a piece of paper and wrote: 1 + 1 = 10. “True statement,” I told him, and then I introduced him to binary and he was engrossed in translating numbers to and from binary for the next half hour. 

Binary was the first thing that came to my mind, but binary isn’t the only way to make 1 + 1 interesting, and I have many more ideas where that came from.