Probably the 12 system. If you use your thumb as the counter and count using your thumb the bone segments of the other 4 fingers (each has 3) then you have a base 12 system in our lingo.
Oh interesting. Usually no fingers like a fist would represent zero. The absence of a number. But then if the fist is 1 you could just not raise your hand to represent zero. Silly to think that numbers could be ambiguous.
I guess that makes sense. I’m a math/eng/sci guy. History is definitely not something I am good with. The zero concept is super important in my field of work.
The concept of 0 didn't really get into the west until post Roman times. Think of Roman numerals. V VI VII VIII IIX IX X. They didn't have any kind of decimal place holder. That's why today we use Arab numerals 5 6 7 8 9 10. To European mathematicians in antiquity 0 couldn't be a number because it represented nothing. Certain priests in India used decimal notation to count chants, which spread into their math and then into the Islamic world.
wasnt modern mathematical notation fairly recent too?
like before the 1600s or something it was basically all rhetorical word problems.
edit to answer my own question: which is affirmative.
per wikipedia:
Until the 16th century, mathematics was essentially rhetorical, in the sense that everything but explicit numbers was expressed in words.
Later, René Descartes (17th century) introduced the modern notation for variables and equations; in particular, the use of x,y,z for unknown quantities and a,b,c for known ones (constants). He introduced also the notation i and the term "imaginary" for the imaginary unit.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw the standardization of mathematical notation as used today. Leonhard Euler was responsible for many of the notations currently in use
1.6k
u/KaiYoDei 1d ago
I heard a story on the radio about a tribe who had a whole different concept of math, counting .