In Sanskrit astronomy you could write a number as a string of images: moon-eyes-fires-oceans. Because science was composed in metrical verse, mathematicians built a vocabulary where moon = 1, eyes = 2, fires = 3, oceans = 4, arrows = 5 — dozens of synonyms per digit, read in place-value order — so any constant could be phrased to fit any meter. The same number could be written hundreds of ways, every one of them a line of poetry, and the system is still used when numbers appear in Sanskrit verse today.