Why do we need a symbol that literally means nothing? But zero is what makes it possible for me to tell 1 from 10 from 1,000,000 from 0.1. The Babylonians didn’t have a symbol for zero. No, the biggest issue we had was nothing. Image: public domain, via sugarfish and Wikimedia Commons. Unlike the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use today, Babylonian numerals “look like” the numbers they represent.īabylonian numerals are surprisingly easy to decipher.

The biggest difficulty my students and I had deciphering these numbers was not the fact that there were so many extra numerals to keep track of. 25 means “two tens, five ones.' 52 has the same symbols, but it means 'five tens, two ones.' Similarly, 1,3 in sexagesimal means “one sixty, 3 ones,” or 63, and 3,57 means “three sixties, fifty-seven ones,” or 237. To us, the digit 2 can mean 2, 20, 200, or 2/10, and so on, depending on where it appears in a number. Their notation is not terribly hard to decipher, partly because they use a positional notation system, just like we do. The Babylonian number system uses base 60 (sexagesimal) instead of 10. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Īs I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand Babylonian* mathematical notation and decipher Plimpton 322, an enigmatic tablet from about 1800 BCE. Plimpton 322, an ancient Mesopotamian mathematical tablet whose purpose is still a mystery.

Convert babylonian numerals