this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
7 points (70.6% liked)
Standardization
453 readers
1 users here now
Professionals have standards! Community for all proponents, defenders and junkies of the Metric (International) system, the ISO standards (including ISO 8601) and other ways of standardization or regulation!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Base 6 would be better and maybe even base 12 could be too. Luckily the United States customary units already use a lot of numbers with more useful prime factorization than 10 like 4 and 3 and even 120.
Babylonians were obsessed with divisibility, so they went with a base 60 system. That’s why we still have 60 minutes 60 and seconds. Also the 360 degrees of a circle fits that ideology, because 6*60=360.
Was it really base-60? Like "10" in Babylonian was 60 and they had 59 individual symbols for the digits lower than that? If so, that's a lot of digits to learn.
To represent a number using Babylonian Cuneiform Numbers, you choose a symbol to represent 10 (
(2*2*2)+2) and a symbol to represent 1, and you create them combined in groups that are summed together to represent numbers up to 59 (10+10+10+10+10+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1). When one group is to the left of another, the group to the left represents a number that is 60 times greater than it would if the group to its right hadn't been created. A symbol representing a group that sums to 0 was sometimes used.The Numberphile channel created videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3zzQP3bII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9m2jck1f90
Interesting, thanks, I'll watch the video.