Recently, I found myself thinking about one of my math lessons in Anthropology class. We had been talking about how experts in many areas of science and math come together to help anthropologists put pieces of the ancient puzzle together.
The numeration systems that we had gone over in math class came to my mind. It's interesting to think about the symbols that we use for numbers. They vary from the Egyptians, to Babylonians, to the Romans, to our own set of numerals, the Hindu-Arabic numeration system.
In class, we did an activity to find out what symbol represented what number in various ancient numeration systems. This was helpful to understand that there are different ways to group objects, or numbers, other than in groups of ten. Certain cultures group numbers by different bases. What I mean by base, is how many numbers or objects that they place in a group. Our numeration system is a base-ten system. That means that we group our numbers in groups of ten. So, the symbol that we use to represent the number eleven is 11, one group of ten, plus one more unit. To understand base-ten, you can use base-five pieces. This is grouping of five, instead of grouping of ten. An example of this would be: the symbol that represents the number six is 6 in base-ten. In base-five the symbol is 11; that is one group of five and one unit. Learning this helps to understand carrying numbers in addition by making exchanges. Some examples of base-five and base-ten can be found at this website http://www.basic-mathematics.com/base-five.html
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