Numeration Systems - Why Numeration Systems Exist, History, The Bases Of Numeration Systems, Base 2, Base 10 Or Decimal
representation counting
Numeration systems are structured methods or procedures for counting in order to determine the total units in a collection. Numeration systems consist of counting bases (base 2, base 5, base 10, base 20, etc.) and some form of representation. This representation might be as primitive as the hand signals used in aborigine cultures and in the trading pits of stock exchanges, or it could be written on paper or inscribed magnetically in an electronic medium like a computer diskette.
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Numeration systems exist for three reasons: to identify, to order, and to tally. Numeration systems are used to identify people and property, because they preserve confidentiality, increase security, and minimize errors caused when there are many people with the same name or many identical objects in the same production run in a factory assembly line. There are thousands of people named "Jo…
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 …
The base 60 system seems very strange to Western readers. From long habit, we are accustomed to the decimal system, and it is easy to understand numbering systems based on two (arms), five (fingers), ten (fingers on both hands), and so on. However, the base 60 system survives in our time-measuring system of 60 seconds to a minute and 60 minutes to an hour. It also survives in angle measurement and…
A place-value system assigns a certain value to the spatial location of a number in a series. For example, in the decimal system, a number's position relative to others in a series defines its category as being in the tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, and so on. In the number 1,234, the "4" occupies the slot representing zero through 9, the "3" occupies t…
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