Humans, for the most part, count in chunks of 10 — that’s the foundation of the decimal system. Despite its near-universal adoption, however, it’s a completely arbitrary numbering system that emerged ...

The ancient Babylonians preferred a Base 60 system, or five twelve’s, a system that we still retain for time-keeping. An hour has 60 minutes, a minute 60 seconds. Mariners and geographers prefer the ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

Recent progress on the “sum product” problem recalls a celebrated mathematical result that revealed the power of miniature number systems. It’s one thing to turn a cartwheel in an open field. It’s ...

The International System of Units (with the abbreviation of SI units) is one of the foundations of modern science. It consists of seven base units from which all others can be derived. These are the ...