Ancient Number Systems

We studied the Babylonians, Romans, Hindu, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Mayan number systems for our project.

The Ancient Egyptians used "base ten" and so did the Babylonians and Hindus. The Romans used "base five" and the Mayans used "base twenty". Some systems such as the Mayans, Hindu and later Babylonian used "zero". Some number systems such as the Babylonians, Mayans, Chinese, and Hindus used "place value" while others such as the Romans and Egyptians did not.

On the next page there is information about the number system we designed. Our number system uses "base ten" and "zero". We based our number system partly on the Hindu system because we think it is the most useful system.

Here are some examples of the Chinese number system which Midori wrote for this project.

Here are some examples of all the number systems which we studied for this project.