3 ms·

If you make the units base-12, leaving the numerical system base-10, it will be really inconvenient. How much is 12^4? 10^4 is obvious, even if this 10 is a dec

• moron4hire 12y ago
  That's kind of the whole crux of the problem. It's all just culture. Some mathematicians like to act like math is a universal language that transcends culture, but ultimately it's impossible for a human to communicate anything without the basis of culture, so that dirty, ol' not-hard-science has to creep in somewhere. Or else what is the use of it, if you can't talk about it? If we were more focused as a culture on a base-12 system, we'd be using a base-12 numbering system as well, in which case 12^4 would be written as "10000", leaving us to ask the crazy base-10 proponents just how easy they expect it would be to represent 10^4 ("5954" in base 12). Base-2's popularity has nothing to do with 2^10 ~= 10^3, except where it serves hard drive manufacturers to sow uncertainty around the difference between Mibi- and Mega- bytes. Otherwise, it's just happy circumstance. Base-2 works because binary computers were ready for work before trinary computers were developed. The numbers are only useful because we've decided as a culture that they should be so. There is nothing sacrosanct about the number 10 (or 12 for that matter). As all things, mathematics is only useful insofar as it is useful. We get to choose the way we abstract reality. It's kind of one of the things that makes us human.