What’s the 411 on 101?

‘Don’t be daft,’ said my husband. It was a valid but unhelpful piece of advice in response to a question I’d asked him. The question was: ‘Have you read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?’

I didn’t want him to explain it (which would indeed have been daft), merely to explain the numbering system of the text. ‘The decimal numbers of my remarks absolutely must be printed alongside them,’ the philosopher had demanded, ‘because they alone make the book perspicuous and clear: without the numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble.’

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I had thought they might be connected with the adjectival 101 (as in ‘art history 101’). That usage comes from American university courses, the first occurrence cited being at the University of Buffalo in 1929: ‘general science 101’. Since it is basic, one might think that the figure 1 would suffice.