Babylonian Mathematics



60 may be convenient and/ or useful as the base for a number notational system because of size, where perhaps the Babylonians lived in tribes or clans of 60 individuals rather than 10 which is quite small. Another speculative guess may be that 60 is the number of Gods or deities Babylonians worshiped, or that the number 60 has cultural significance in terms of religious events or phenomena. 60 may also be approximately the number in which a certain significant crop grew or yielded or sold that was consumed on a regular basis. 60 is different from 10 because of the number of factors it has relative to 10, whereas 10 only has four factors.


60 is of course, still used in our current time-telling system in which it the basis for minutes and seconds where 1 hour and 1 minute are composed of 60 minutes and 60 seconds respectively. 60 is also significant because of the number of days of year is approximately 360 which is divisible by 60. I would also speculate that Babylonians were able to approximate the number of days in a year based on the Sun, and realize that 360 could easily be divided using a base of 60.


After doing some research regarding the sexagesimal, I realized its many advantages because of 60's high number of factors which makes it easier to write fractions and simplify numbers, a number that divided quite easily. Therefore, fair reasoning for the Babylonians to choose this number as its base. I find it really fascinating that our current denomination of time is really just a whole sexagesimal number, for example, 9 hours 54 minutes and 2 seconds is just 9 × 602 + 54 × 601 + 2 × 60. Our inspiration from Babylonians go beyond just for time use, and extend to geometric and astronomic applications we derive from Babylonians maths, where the 360 degrees of a circle is based on six 60's, and a degree is composed of 60 minutes. I was fascinated to learn that the Chinese calendar also incorporate sixty where they use 60 stem branches.

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskySeptember 11, 2019 at 10:41 AM

    Fascinating speculation on community sizes, religious connections and times for crops to ripen, Jovan! I don’t know if these were part of the story, but it would be very interesting to look deeper at these ideas. Great work!

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