The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

As 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 ...

Today is a big day for lovers of the number 12, and no one loves 12s more than the members of the Dozenal Society. The Dozenal Society advocates for ditching the base-10 system we use for counting in ...