Re: unit names

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 02:42 12/8/98 -0500, you wrote:

> > as recently as 1686 Newton's Principia
> divided number not into decimals but into sexagesimals, =

> brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
> Altus OK<
>
> Wow!  Do I understand you to say that the Principia is written =
> in base 60?  Ie Newton & his contemporaries knew and used =
> 60 different digit symbols, ie that they wrote 59 as "z" (or whatever)
> and 60 as "10"?

> Bill Larson
> Geneva
[I discarded the epithet....]

It seems Bill has difficulty with the allied but seperate concepts of
number base, number symbol and place value. (There is another concept needed
to tie down a number system and that is the expression of zero, but Bill
seems to have avoided this one.)

I'll try to be brief: The Babylonian sexagesimal used basically three symbols,
the down, left and right arrowhead (but no zero value)
the Mayan vigesimal used two symbols - the line and the dot -  PLUS a zero
circle, and more recently the English base five tally system used two
symbols, (the vertical line for one through four, and the horizontal line
for five).
No zero symbol was available in this non-place value system. That nation
also evolved  base 12 and base 20 schemes.

 I hope you will see that the number of symbols has no necessary
coincidence with the number base though it is certainly convenient to
allocate a unique symbol for counting systems of modest base, such as the
current hexadecimal
0-9, A-F





brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK