Re: [HM] base 5

Tony Mann (A.Mann@greenwich.ac.uk)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 08:09:55 GMT

>> The recent post that cited 0-4 counting as base 4 may have meant
>> base 5, as Egyptians from the Lower Kingdom may have practiced,
>> as Greek may have been told by oral histories.
>
> Yet, I assure you that my citation is accurate. Sturmius,
> sometime a little before 1700, indeed invested more than a dozen
> pages to the virtues and arithmetic properties of base 4 arithmetic,
> and cited both Aristotle and Wallis to back his claims.
> I was surprised, too.
> * Ed Sandifer * sandifer@wcsu.ctstateu.edu *

When I was a student (must have been about 1980) there was an article
in New Scientist proposing a decimal system but with digits representing
-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 so that 16 would have been written as
"2 (-4) ". The benefit is that multiplication tables are much fewer and
simpler. I can't recall whether a history was given for this system.

Tony

Tony Mann

School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
The University of Greenwich
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