• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    It seems to me that with a reed you could also underline something or draw a slash between items, so you could do 𒁹 / 𒁹 for 61 vs 𒁹 𒁹 for 2.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      If anything I would use the slash for zero. Maybe a dot in the middle for place differentiation, though that could make a slash irrelevant.

      Ultimately Babylon was really really good at logistics and administration, and they did a great job with stuff like tracking the sky. But it was a very early civilization. It’s easy for us to give notes 4000 years later, but our modern mathematical notation is a product of international collaboration over a millennium by different civilizations that all produced great mathematicians. When we compare them to their contemporaries we can see that they were surprisingly forward thinking, being the only ones using place value in their geographical and temporal region.