Section 1.1 Introduction
Humans devised a base-10 number system simply because the species evolved with 10 fingers. We could have used any other base-system -- in fact, some ancient civilizations did. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians (3000BCE and 2000BCE, respectively) used base-60, while the Mayans and Aztecs adopted base-20 (circa 1400CE and 1500CE, respectively). The Alaskan Iñupak as well as the Eskimo-Aleut languages all include a base-20 numeral system in their current forms.
What’s so special about base-10, base-20, or base-60? The Babylonians are credited with developing the concept of a 24-hour day, with each hour broken into 60-minutes and each minute broken into 60-seconds. The number 60 was attractive because it had many factors. The numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 all divide evenly into 60. This meant that working in base-60 often made fractions easy to work with. One conjectured reason that the Mayans utilized a Base-20 system is that they lived in a warm climate, where they simply didn’t wear shoes. Having their toes exposed meant an additional set of 10 digits readily available for counting.
Perhaps not [currently] qualifying as a civilization, but an important component of our lives nonetheless are machines -- more specifically, computers. Computers don’t have the advantage, nor the awareness, of fingers or toes. They’re simply aware of the presence or absence of electrical pulses. Because of this, it is natural for them to process and store information in a base-2 system -- a system more commonly known as binary.
