12 Jan (02): History of Numbers...& Numbers as a Language

Instead of ten digits like we have today, the Maya used a base number of 20. (Base 20 is vigesimal.) They also used a system of bar and dot as "shorthand" for counting. A dot stood for one and a bar stood for five. In the following table, you can see how this works.

0	1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19

Because the base of the number system was 20, larger numbers were written down in powers of 20. We do that in our decimal system too: for example 32 is 3*10+2. In the Maya system, this would be 1*20+12, because they used 20 as base.

So for 2010:

2=0=1=0=

Thank you all.