Numeration Systems

No one knows exactly when ordered numeration systems began, but counting has been around for tens of thousands of years. A notched baboon bone dating back 35,000 years was found in Africa and was apparently used for counting. In the 1930s, a wolf bone was found in Czechoslovakia with 57 notches in several patterns of regular intervals. The bone was dated as 30,000 years old and is assumed to be a hunter's record of his kills.

The earliest recorded numbering systems go back at least 3000 B.C., when Sumerians in Mesopotamia were using a numbering system for recording business transactions, and Egyptians and people in ancient India were also using numbering systems around the same time. The decimal or base 10 numbering system goes back to at least 1800 B.C., and decimal systems were common in European and Indian cultures from at least 1000 B.C. One of the most important innovations in western culture was the development of the Hindu-Arabic notation system (1, 2, 3,... 9), which is the international standard today. The Hindu-Arabic system had been around for at least 2,000 years before the Europeans heard about it, and it has many important innovations. One of these was the placeholding concept of zero. Although the concept of zero as a null place holder had appeared in many cultures in different forms, the first actual written zero as we know it today appeared in India in 876 A.D. The Hindu-Arabic system was brought into Europe in the tenth century with Gerbert of Aurillac (945-1003), and it slowly and steadily began to replace Roman numerals (I, II, III, IV...) in Europe, especially in business transactions and mathematics. By the sixteenth century, Europe was well versed in the far simpler and more economical Hindu-Arabic system of notation, though Roman Numerals were still used, and are even used today.

Numeration systems continue to be invented to this day, especially when companies develop systems of serial numbers to identify new products. The binary (base 2), octal (base 8), and hexadecimal (or base 16) numbering systems used in computers were extensively developed in the late 1950s for processing electronic signals in computers.