Positional system

Positional notation or place-value notation is a method of representing or encoding numbers. Positional notation is distinguished from other notations (such as Roman numerals) for its use of the same symbol for the different orders of magnitude (for example, the "ones place", "tens place", "hundreds place"). This greatly simplified arithmetic, leading to the rapid spread of the notation across the world.

With the use of a radix point (decimal point in base-10), the notation can be extended to include fractions and the numeric expansions of real numbers.

The Babylonian numeral system, base-60, was the first positional system developed, and its influence is present today in the way time and angles are counted in tallies related to 60, like 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a circle. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, base-10, is the most commonly used system in the world today for most calculations.

Today, the base-10 (decimal) system, which is likely motivated by counting with the ten fingers, is ubiquitous. Other bases have been used in the past however, and some continue to be used today. For example, the Babylonian numeral system, credited as the first positional numeral system, was base-60, but it lacked a real 0 value. Zero was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from about 700 BC), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges. The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120 (2×60), 3 and 180 (3×60), 4 and 240 (4×60), looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them.

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