Count to 60 with your phalanges!

Gabrielle Birchak/ November 9, 2021/ Uncategorized

Did you know that 5,000 years ago Ancient Sume­ri­ans solved math in base 60 instead of base 10?!! They count­ed to 60 by count­ing the 3 pha­langes on each fin­ger on one hand and with their oth­er hand they indi­cat­ed each time they added 12 more num­bers to their count. So by adding 12 num­bers 5 times they were able to count to 60! This is base 60, also known as the sex­a­ges­i­mal num­ber sys­tem. It is still used today to mea­sure time, angles, and geo­graph­i­cal coordinates.

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