3 ms·
I'm not sure what your point is. A numbering system based on five-fingered hands is still base6. It doesn't make mathematical sense to argue that we learn base1
by DareRight 8y ago
I'm not sure what your point is. A numbering system based on five-fingered hands is still base6. It doesn't make mathematical sense to argue that we learn base10 today because our hands have 5 fingers. Even if you argue that we have 10 total fingers, that's base11. Does anybody advocate that? How did we come to such an arbitrary thing as base ten?
- umanwizard 8y agoNo, counting on the hands is not base anything, because positional number systems did not exist. Just like Roman numerals or tally marks aren't base anything. People counted on fingers like with tally marks - they could express the numbers one through ten. Thus ten became an important and familiar number to humans. Thus it would have seemed natural to use a base 10 number system many millennia later.