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Number systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.
300 — the earliest known use of zero as a decimal digit in the Old World is introduced by Indian mathematicians. c. 400 — the Bakhshali manuscript uses numerals with a place-value system, using a dot as a place holder for zero . 550 — Hindu mathematicians give zero a numeral representation in the positional notation Indian numeral system.
History of ancient numeral systems – Symbols representing numbers Long and short scales – Two meanings of "billion" and "trillion" Myriad – Order of magnitude name for 10,000
A form of unary notation called Church encoding is used to represent numbers within lambda calculus. Some email spam filters tag messages with a number of asterisks in an e-mail header such as X-Spam-Bar or X-SPAM-LEVEL. The larger the number, the more likely the email is considered spam. 10: Bijective base-10: To avoid zero: 26: Bijective base-26
He also writes that "no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10." [2] Alexander Marshack examined the Ishango bone microscopically, and concluded that it may represent a six-month lunar calendar. [3]
Ancient Aramaic alphabets had enough letters to reach up to 9000. In mathematical and astronomical manuscripts, other methods were used to represent larger numbers. Roman numerals and Attic numerals, both of which were also alphabetic numeral systems, became more concise over time, but required their users to be familiar with many more signs.
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The wireframe may be used either with positional notation like other abacuses (thus the 10-wire version may represent numbers up to 9,999,999,999), or each bead may represent one unit (e.g. 74 can be represented by shifting all beads on 7 wires and 4 beads on the 8th wire, so numbers up to 100 may be represented).