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History of Counting Systems

Podcast and Script Legend of Base 10 Podcast Here, Justin Vance introduces and reads the story of the Legend of Base 10.


This article supports the idea that our base-10 counting system comes from our number of fingers.

Positional notation was a huge technological advancement. Ancient peoples without positional notation in their counting systems would have to use a new symbol every time they reached numbers that were too large for the current symbols they were using. For example, even the more advanced Roman Numerals have to keep adding symbols when the numbers get too large, e.g. Super Bowl XLVIII, much more complicated than Super Bowl 48.


So, according to the TedEd talk and according to legend, we use the decimal system, because we have 10 fingers, but not everybody agrees with keeping the base-10 system, and historically, not everybody has used the base-10 system.


base-27 counting system

Some people today still use other number systems based off counting in other ways. This article includes 12 different counting systems used by other cultures, some of them still in use. My favorite of these odd counting systems is the base-27 system of the Oksapim people of New Guinea. They count using multiple parts of their bodies, tracing from the pinky finger of one hand, along their arms and head, to their opposite pinky finger.