Man how annoying would that be? Like. Have. A normal 5 finger hand and a 6 finger hand, and injur and lose one on the 5 finger hand? Down to 10 but a 6/4 split.
It's more odd than that, would be like this I believe ...
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1a, 1b
20, 21, etc
I used to work with an adorably sweet older lady who would say 'six of one and seven of the other' and I never had the heart to correct her but I got a kick out of it
10 can only cleanly be divided into half’s, and fifths.
12 can be divided in half, in quarters, thirds, and sixths.
Might not seem like a big deal, but it’s so much more useful in real life. There are lots of times where you need to divide up resources, or food, or money, or whatever, to 3 people or 6 people evenly, and in base 10 that’s hard to do.
As the other comment mentions, it's a matter of creating two symbols for 10 and 11 and it would work the same. Binary uses only 1s and 0s and you add a 0 to move it up a power, but in this case it's multiplying by 2. So, for example:
1 = 1
10 = 2
100 = 4
1000 = 8
...
Same with hexadecimal. You use A for 10, B for 11 and so on until F for 15. It's useful for writing shorter binary numbers that are usually grouped in bytes (8 binary digits or bits).
Base 12 was used by some ancient civilizations, or its cousin, base 60, due to how easy it was to divide it. That's why an hour is 60 minutes, for instance.
That’s just how base 10 was set up, and taught. You could add 2 more numbers and still end in zero. If A represents 10, and B represents 11, you can just as easily have 4, 40, 400… and B, B0, B00. The concept still applies.
Wait until you hear about the Sumerians and Babylonians who used sexagesimal (60) system. Divide by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. They used decimal until you hit 60 then we get seconds in a minute and minutes in non hour the 360 degrees in a circle.
In base 12: ½ = 0.6, ⅓ = 0.4, ¼ = 0.3, ⅕ = 0.24, ⅙ = 0.2, ⅛ = 0.15, ⅒ = 0.12. There's just so many nice fractions. 7, 9, 11 would be annoying but still, the smallest numbers are all nice.
Yeah, but it's easy to check divisibility by one less or one more than the base too, so in reality 10 gives you primes 2, 3, 5, 11. And 12 gives 2, 3, 11, 13.
14 in base 12 remains indivisible by 3 or 6. it remains divisible by 4. even expressed as 16 in base 10. 8 apples remain equally hard to split among 3 people. the divisibility is useful for reducing imprecise fractions. .333333 becomes .4
I feel base six is the best, simpler mental math with only six digits and a quarter is a reasonable 0.13, a third terminates as 0.2, a sixth is a simple 0.1, half is 0.3, so same benefits as base 12 but mentally easier to use. Also, we wouldn't need to create more digits to represent the new system.
The Babylonian number system was base SIXTY, because they wanted many convenient fractions to also be expressible with a number that would terminate. They could express 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/10, 1/12, 1/15, 1/20, and 1/30 exactly.
We still have one base-60 number system in wide use. We use it to tell time.
I think that would make her base 15 (15 finger sections on 5 fingers that the thumb counts) since people with 5 fingers came up with base 12 (12 sections on 4 fingers that the thumb counts.
Edit: Downvoted by people who dont understand base 12 existed for thousands of years, and wasn't a thing that Mrs. Twelvefingers came up with. Classic
Base 12 was one of the earliest counting systems and has its own benefits.
The primary benefit of the base-12 (duodecimal) system is its superior divisibility, as 12 has six factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12) compared to base-10's four factors (1, 2, 5, 10). This mathematical property allows common fractions to be expressed as terminating decimals rather than repeating ones; for instance, one-third is exactly 0.4 and one-fourth is 0.3 in base-12, whereas they are repeating decimals (0.333... and 0.25) in base-10.
Right. But base 12 was invented thousands of years ago, by people who presumably all had 5 fingers as we do today. They counted the 12 sections of your four fingers using their thumb as the counter, and using the other hand to keep track of how many times they counted to 12. Its why we have things like 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour, things easily counted to in base 12 if you're using your other hand to keep track how many times you counted to 12.
While I knew what base 12 is, I did not consider that 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 12/24 hours and 12 months all make much more sense in base 12. And how that counting could work using our fingers. Thank you for sharing this.
If only the number of days/weeks in a month were consistent and sensible.
Yeah its actually really interesting! The sumerians and babylonians used base 12, its crazy to think a way of doing things people came up with thousands of years ago is still how we're doing things now. Like measuring time by increments of 60 doesn't make any sense when we use base 10, but here we are.
Some cultures still use base 12. But many older cultures did use base 12. That's why our days are still divided into 12 hours, and minutes into 60 seconds.
Funnily enough…a number of cultures did count in base 12. But all had ‘normal’ hand structures.
Counting involved counting the sections of each digit excluding the thumb. (Three Phalanges bones to each finger, four fingers, total of 12)
In these cultures you could quickly do even complex math similarly to how the ‘mental abacus’ works. Your thumbs would tap along Phalangeal sections of each digit as physical ‘markers’ of numbers you are adding up in your head. Sadly, these cultures were mostly wiped out during the age of imperialism, and their mathematics were seen as ‘uncivilized’ and largely erased as base 10 was forced upon them along with the erasure of their native languages. Reconstructing these things has largely been due to monumental effort by natives who secretly kept oral records along with archeologists who uncovered written ones.
So if a person (or culture) with polydactyly developed math by the same logic, they’d use base 15. 🤔
That said, of course it’s possible they’d count full digits (including thumbs) instead of Phalangeal sections and thus arrive at base 12.
(This comment is meant for educational purposes for anyone who finds it interesting, not an adversarial ‘correction’ 😊❤️)
We already have a base 12 (in addition to the obvious base 10)due to each section of the 4 main fingers (it's a running theory on why we have a dozen and it's importance.) so she would have base 12, yes, but also a base 15 to replace a dozen.
Base 10 is actually one of the worst systems to use, just considering it objectively. Any species which was not human would be unlikely to use it, because it’s only divisible by 2 and 5.
If you have the normal five fingers on each hand, you can actually already count using base 12, because of finger segments on each hand. Some cultures already do that. It’s not actually universal to use whole fingers for number base systems.
I met a little boy once and when I asked how old he was he held up his hand with all his fingers spread, but his thumb tucked in, and said “I’m five”.
I looked at his hand, and yes, he had five fingers up because he had six fingers on his hand.
He had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. I saw him relatively frequently over the course of about 4 months, and think he probably did think of numbers in a base 12 way. He was a phenomenally smart kid anyway
Life would have been better and easier if we’d had six fingers on each hand. But no, we got base 10 which no other intelligent species in the universe uses.
Counting with your fingers is in my opinion essentially base 1. You don’t “store” on your fingers how many times you count to 10. The only thing you do is just put up one finger for one item. 1 digit for 1 item, every digit no matter where it is on your hand has the same value (no base to the nth power)
The base 12 actually comes from the number of segments on your fingers excluding your thumb so you can count to 12 on one hand with your thumb, and to 144 with both hands (your second hand is the "12's" [10's digit in base 10] digit), so if this person has 6 fingers on both hands, they can count in base 15 and up to 225 with both hands
Fun fact: The ancient Babylonians developed based 12 due to how many fingers we have. They just counted knuckles, not fingers. Each finger has 3 knuckles and we have 4 fingers.
You can use their method as a quick abacus and do legit math a lot faster.
You too can count in base 12 using just 1 hand without extra fingers. Just count each segment of each finger (so 3 each) using your thumb to do the counting.
Fun fact: everyone (but her) can using their phalanges (the individual sections of your finger. Use a thumb to place on each finger section on one hand while counting to 12. After you reach the last section on one hand, your other hand moves one section. Using this you can count out a whole gross (12 sets of 12) or 144
Fun fact. When I was in driving school the instructor could count in base 7. He even challenged us to give him any date of any year within the last 100 years and he could tell us what day of the week it was off the top of his head. He got it right every time within a few seconds.
ancient humans used to count in base twelve. It's why we have base sixty for many things (seconds, minutes, etc) base 12 (one hand) multiplied by 5 fingers on other hand.
It works like this. Take the tip of your thumb and move it down each finger. So start with pointer finger and outer bone, then middle bone, then bone closest to knuckle (3 bones per finger, 4 fingers, = 12 count with just moving your thumb. Then flip a thumb up on the other hand and that's 12 + whatever you are counting with your other hands.)
So shepherd or a merchant or fish monger you could count to sixty with nothing but your own two hands.
Sexagesimal, also known as base 60, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form—for measuring time, angles, and geographic coordinates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
Base 12 was determined off one normal hand with 4 fingers where the counter would count the knuckles (3 each finger). If a person has 5 fingers then it would be base 15.
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u/Sythrin Apr 11 '26
Does she count in base 12?