kay
Well-known member
ZombieCake said:People like the Mayans used a base 20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals
Suspect there may be traces of base 20 in French with "quatre-vingt dix neuf" etc. And of course English, French, Portuguese etc are all about confused between 10 and 20 as to whetehr they're counting in 10s or not. We of course used a mixed base system for money (20,12 and 4 with the occasional 21 for variety). It's always puzzled me why, faced with a class full of children who were used to counting in base 4, 10, 12,14,16,20 and 60, our teachers made such a hash of teaching us about binary. It should not have been a weird and exotic concept.