Why do humans use a base 10 number system? Once I moved up a little in the math levels & learned about the other possibilities, I have always found it curious that we would’ve collectively arrived at base 10.
Have you looked at your hands?
Close thread now.
This is in fact the answer.
Terribly misleading title.
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Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Ever really get into your hand, man? I mean, all those lines, it’s like a tiny expressway! Your thumb is an off ramp!
This is the winner, hands down.
When primitive humans first started counting, I’m sure that they assigned a number to each digit. Since most humans have ten digits on their two hands, that means a pretty strong bias to having 10 as the base numbering system, even though other numbers might be more logical or at least easier to work with.
they can touch everything but themselves. Oh wait, there they go.
Now arguably base 10 has the advantage and this is mentioned in the other thread, but it’s worth repeating that we didn’t collectively arrive at base 10. Other bases, either alone or in combination with base 10, have been common throughout the world and base 10 is sometimes replacing them, not through being inherently better, but due to the convenience of adapting to an international standard.
An apparently silly question, but, humans couldve looked at their hands and create a base 5 numering system, allowing much larger numbers to be stored in 10 digits (before having to mentally roll over). Riddle me that.
Two things:
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Roman and Greek numbering is said to have an “intermediate base” of 5 from what I understand (the Roman “V”).
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You’d actually be able to store LESS into in 10 digits, the biggest base 5 number in 10 digits is 4444444444=(000)9765624*, as opposed to 9999999999
- The zeroes are added to point out that it’s in fact three digits shorter.
Unless you’re referring to having one hand be the “25s place” and one hand being the “5s place”, in which case I retort “yeah, well I can count on binary on my hands to get really big numbers so :p!” (Don’t count to 4 or 5 in binary starting with the thumb as 1).
ETA: Now that I think about it, what I described wouldn’t be base 5, it’d be base 6. 0-5 on one hand, {6,12,18,24,30} on the other.
ETAETA: Actually, that’s a good question even for base 10. Our hands can represent 0-10, why not roll over places on 11? It makes more sense to me to say my two hands can represent the numbers 0-A, and when I start over it’s 10 (aka 11).
The Mayans sort of did - their numbering system is actually base 20, but for small numbers it looks like base 5.
Twenty!? That’s BS.:dubious:
Before Shoes 
I was going to say that, but mine was the first answer so I restrained myself. 
Schoolhouse Rock had a song for twelve that was called “Hey, Little Twelvetoes” and is about an alien with twelve fingers who had a base 12 number system because of it.
It would have been so easy to get base 12 from this–just add palms. Then metric would have been base 12, and we could have quarter-kilos and third-litres easily. One of the few advantages of the Imperial system would remain in our current measuring system.
Mind you, multiplication tables would be bigger. But I seem to recall we had to learn our multiplication tables up to 12 x 12 anyways, just expressed in base ten.
I can’t imagine base 11 would ever be popular, even if we started afresh — but maybe that’s just me.
I’d vote for base 6 over 12, if that were a choice. You get the same divisibility advantages (all numbers that terminate in base 12 also terminate in base 6), but you’d reduce the size of the multiplication table.
Of course, base 6 would lengthen the representation of many numbers, compared to either base 10 or 12, and it would shrink the catalog of Schoolhouse Rock cartoons.
So there is a cost.
If they’d asked me way back when, I’d have suggested base 8. That way, decimals wouldn’t grow without bound when you divide by 2. Instead of 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, you’d just have to deal with 0.4, 0.2, 0.1, 0.04, etc…
Tim R. Mortiss, if we used base 8 would we even have decimals?