"System of numeration" Quotes from Famous Books
... might be supposed from the uncultivated state of the people by whom they are spoken. I am far from placing the languages of the New World in the same rank with the finest languages of Asia and Europe; but no one of these latter has a more neat, regular, and simple system of numeration, than the Quichua and the Aztec, which were spoken in the great empires of Cuzco and Anahuac. It is a mistake to suppose that those languages do not admit of counting beyond four, because in villages ... — Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... shekel were originally weights, and had been adopted by the Semites from their Sumerian predecessors. They form part of that sexagesimal system of numeration which lay at the root of Babylonian mathematics and was as old as the invention of writing. So thoroughly was sixty regarded as the unit of calculation that it was denoted by the same single wedge or upright line as that which stood for "one." Wherever the sexagesimal system of notation ... — Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce |