The Romans used a fraction system based on 12, including the uncia which became both the English words ounce and inch.

In the Roman numeral system, numerals are represented by various letters. The basic numerals used by the Romans are: I = 1, V = 5, X = 10, L = 50, C = 100, D = 500, M = 1000. These numerals can be strung together, in which case they would be added together in order to represent larger numbers.

Roman Numerals were also used for as dating on cornerstones of buildings showing origin of a building, statutes, headstones, books publication such as in chapter titles, volume of book series, appendices, numbers on clocks and so on.

The Roman numerals were adopted to clarify any confusion that may occur because the NFL Championship Game—the Super Bowl—is played in the year following a chronologically recorded season. Numerals I through IV were added later for the first four Super Bowls.

base ten

Roman numerals are base 10 or decimal, like the numbers we use today. They are not entirely positional, however, and there is no number zero. Roman numerals use letters instead of numbers.

Nature gave us ten fingers, and so it is natural for us to count in tens. Machines count bigger numbers in the same way we do: by counting how many times they run out of digits. This system is called binary and the binary number 10 means the machine ran out of digits one time. A human would call this number two.

Nope, there’s nothing inherently special about 10 (besides the fact that we have 10 fingers and 10 toes!). In fact, we can use any natural number to define our number system (you can also use other numbers such as the golden ratio to define a base, which changes things a bit more).

In mathematics, a base or radix is the number of different digits or combination of digits and letters that a system of counting uses to represent numbers. Because “dec” means 10, it uses the 10 digits from 0 to 9. Most people think that we most often use base 10 because we have 10 fingers.

Computers use binary – the digits 0 and 1 – to store data. The circuits in a computer’s processor are made up of billions of transistors . A transistor is a tiny switch that is activated by the electronic signals it receives. The digits 1 and 0 used in binary reflect the on and off states of a transistor.

Today we use a decimal (base 10) number system, but not all cultures have done the same throughout time. The Mayans, for instance, used both quinary (base 5) and vigesimal (base 20) systems, while the Babylonians used a sexagesimal (base 60) system. So, the way we count is the decimal system. It uses 10 symbols.

7th Century