Re: What advantages does a 12-based number system have vs. a 10-based

Hi Mike,

My speciality is supposed to be engineering not maths, so I can only give 
you my limited perspective.

There is a duo-decimal society which has proposed that 12 is a more useful 
countingbase than 10 for several reasons. Merely because most land based 
mammals have penta-dactyl symmetry does not affect the argument. Having 10 
items to count on doesn't make counting easier (reduce the argument to 
having only 1 item, is it easier to work in binary ??

The reason for the usefulness of the quantity of 12-ness INDEPENDENT of the 
base you are working in, is to do with the number of  factors the number 
possesses. 

10 can only be factored by 2 and 5  
12 can be factored by 2, 3,4 and 6.

The bigger the number used in your base system the more compact your number 
representation. It is common in computer engineering to use hexadecimal 
notation, where you count from 0-15 as 0,1..9,A,B,C,D,E,F. Binary groups of 
4 digits (nibbles) are represented by a single hex digit. and a byte of 8 
bits by 2 digits.so 140 (10) is 8C (hex) A lot less trouble than writing 
10001100, and a lot less prone to error !

We still have two common base 12 systems (Feet and inches) and our entire 
time system is based on 60  (a multiple of 12), a system humans have used 
since the days of Ur and the most ancient Babylonians.

Steve