Place Value: It’s a Binary World page 3
F Razo CSUEB
Through time, different civilizations have adopted various number systems, meaning the use of particular symbols and procedures that reflected their needs and abilities for counting and measurement. Ancient Egyptians (about 2,500 BC) used strokes and icons of special objects to represent abbreviations of counts ( http://www.eyelid.co.uk/numbers.htm ), mostly in groups of ten. During the old Babylonian empire (about 1,800 BC), scribes carved scratches on clay tablets to record numbers representing terms of formal commercial transactions ( http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/babylon/index.htm ). The Chinese (about 500 BC) used a variety of formal and informal sets of characters to represent numbers for different occasions ( http://www.mandarintools.com/numbers.html ), and the Mayans (about 1,000 AD) used dots and lines, mostly to relate to moon cycles, seasons, events, and passage of time in general ( http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/RR/database/RR.09.00/hubbard1/ ).
Eventually, and seemingly due to advantages of having ten fingers (digits) in our hands, number systems converged into the current, simplified decimal system. This system uses only ten symbols (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and zero), and these are used in a series of ordered positions, each of increasingly higher value, each ten times greater than the previous (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc.). Such positions are known as place values, and in the common Base 10 arrangement, the positions increase in value from the right to the left as follows:
etc. . . , 1000, 100, 10, 1